The Problem with Vodafone Live!

Phone Handsets and Networks, posted: 23-Mar-2007 21:56

As someone who has a reputation for watching every penny, I find using Vodafone Live! to be very frustrating because I have to pay a fee for every little scrap of information that I take from it. Everywhere I turn, it's 50 cents here and 50 cents there, and before I know it I've spent a considerable amount of money for a short period of browsing.

With this in mind, it amazes me that Vodafone's clever marketing people haven't yet come up with the idea of offering Vodafone Live! subscription packages. These subscription packages could offer access to a combination of general information services such as news, weather, traffic, webcams, and maps for a discounted package price. This would make the whole Vodafone Live! experience more user friendly, provide better value for customers, and potentially increase revenue by compelling users to take advantage of services which they would otherwise not have used if individual service fees were incurred.

So, how about it, Vodafone?

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Comment by cokemaster, on 23-Mar-2007 22:01 , user id: 9469)

The whole WAP racket seems to be something that isn't isolated to Vodafone or New Zealand for that matter... It would be nice for a change from the 'milking the captive market' that WAP operators seem to exploit.

Comment by Glen Barnes, on 23-Mar-2007 22:55 , user id: )

What bothers me most is that they charge you to get the movie times. Think about that...They want to charge you 50 cents just to find the time of a movie where you will spend $15 on a ticket. They should encourage everyone to chec the movie times for free to increase the conversion from browse to buy.

Comment by Dan, on 24-Mar-2007 00:07 , user id: )

Last week I finally got my Nokia 6111 working with wap/gprs etc. It was made much more difficult seeing I purchased it overseas and Vodafone NZ don't sell that model here so getting the configuration settings was a challenge.

But I got there, and now I'm faced with what seems rather pricey data rates on the casual data plan. I went to the Vodafone store and they said that you can't get any of the other data plans on Prepay so I'm stuck with these high prices to access Mobile Gmail (which is a great service btw)

I hope Vodafone pays some attention to these data based services at some stage as these are future. Just this week I was reading about a new Nokia phone/internet appliance that makes calls via Skype and not the phone network as per normal.

Author's note by alasta, on 24-Mar-2007 11:03 , user id: 210)

There's no denying that external WAP sites and Wi-Fi enabled handsets pose a threat to network operators' revenue streams. It will be interesting to see how they deal with this threat.

Comment by juha, on 24-Mar-2007 13:21 , user id: 16775)

While I won't dispute that telcos are rapacious in general (TXT2Park which costs 50¢ each time on top of the usual SMS and monthly charges is a good example), I thought browsing Vodafone Live was free?

Comment by Dan, on 24-Mar-2007 22:03 , user id: )

As per Vodafone's Website.

"Vodafone Live! - you're charged for what you buy, not for browsing"

Author's note by alasta, on 25-Mar-2007 14:08 , user id: 210)

Clearly Vodafone defines browsing as window shopping for content, which is indeed free. However nearly all of Vodafone Live's content can be accessed only by paying for that content on a section-by-section basis. In other words, it's not possible to do anything useful with Vodafone Live without opening your wallet.

Comment by Bruno Rodrigues, on 28-Mar-2007 23:43 , user id: )

Maybe you should complain to the third party providing you the paid information, and not to Vodafone. The information (news, weather, movies, etc) comes from somewhere, and if that company wants to charge you (the customer) some money, it's not vodafone who decides to make it free to you and pay it themselves.

I know what you feel, though. NZ is similar to UK - everything with a minimum interest is paid. This is the oposite of my country, Portugal, and also where we live now, Germany, where there's plenty of free content available - e.g. the news title and first paragraph is free, and the full news story is paid. Plenty of ringtones/images/etc are temporarily free. Some mobile TV channels are free, etc.

Comment by nehad, on 3-May-2008 21:41 , user id: )

i have nokia n93 and Vodafone sim and i entered vodafone live service but i still can't log onto the net so what can i do?

Comment by Anthony, on 4-May-2008 16:20 , user id: )

There is a way to receive free emails via vodafone which is what i am currently doing have been and vodafone are not allowed to charge me this is avaliable to all users but i regret that i will not provide this information to the public.

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alasta's profile

Alastair Foster
Wellington
New Zealand

Alastair is a 29 year old male based in Wellington, with a background in IT and finance, and a love for outdoor activities and politics.