Mediaboss Marketing

Photo: Gabriele Charotte

Some of Vodafone's customers will start to notice their data quota vanish quicker than usual after the telco announced changes to take effect on February 13.

One of the changes will mean prepaid customers' access to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will no longer be free.

The other change will see the telco begin billing data usage in 1 megabyte blocks with a minimum "session" of 1 megabyte on all prepaid plans.

This second change will mean that whenever a notification or email is pushed to a customer's smartphone, it will be charged at 1 megabyte, regardless of whether only a few kilobytes of data were used.

Advertisement

The move comes afterOptus stopped offering unmetered social networking accesson its contract plans in December.

"No one likes to have to pay for something that they were ordinarily getting for free," said Elise Davidson, a spokeswoman for the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, the peak body that represents consumers on communications issues. "But Vodafone remain one of the cheaper providers when it comes to prepaid. Because this only affects prepaid plans, customers are free to go elsewhere."

Ms Davidson said the change to bill in 1 megabyte blocks for some customers would mean that their data would disappear quicker, but noted that other carrier's prepaid customers, like Optus, were billed in a similar way.

"If you are getting your emails pushed from Microsoft Exchange every 15 minutes, that's 4 megabytes an hour," Ms Davidson said. "People are therefore going to have to look at the settings on their phones in terms of the push notifications if they want to minimise the data that they are using."

Link:
Vodafone to cut free social media