Virgin Mobile accuses rival telcos of milking consumers amid confusion of the value of data
The chief executive of Virgin Mobile has accused competitors of making “bucket loads” of money by “selling air” as he heralded the “customer first” strategy behind his firm’s data rollover offer.
David Scribner said it was “amazing” customers are forbidden from carrying over unused data, texts and calls and claimed consumer’s still have little idea of the value of data.
“What is a gig worth?”, he asked delegates at a conference. “Every time you download a movie how much data does it use on your plan? What about when you download a song? No one knows this and the industry for so long has used this. Why? Because it’s selling air.”
He said no one has any real idea of how much data they have used “which is really scary”, adding that less than 10 per cent of mobile users break their data each month but over 80 per cent break it sometime in six months.
That all makes good sense to me Scribo, but must be a hard line to pedal in your industry. Hope your competitors hold their view, for your sake.
A customer centric Telco? That’s new!
Alan Robertson
Kinesis Media.
There should be no excuse for Telstra, Optus and Vodafone not to offer real-time data usage information now, so why don’t they?
The way Telcos deceive consumers on data is disgusting!
Telstra’s new “Extra Data” feature that they’ve just rolled out sounded great at first, however while introducing it they also made it even harder for the consumer to monitor their data use. Previously Telstra’s SMS data alerts would tell you how much data you have remaining and also how long you have left of your billing cycle. Now they hide how long is left in the billing cycle so that the consumer can’t ration out their remaining data!
From the TVC: “unused data rolls over for one month only”
What makes 2 months any fairer than 1 month? Either it’s indefinite rollover, or it’s still just an arbitary number. What a waste of time.