Telecom Comes to the Party

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alasta

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#2145 1-Sep-2004 16:14

The telecom store on Lambton Quay has a big sign outside advertising 49c 24/7, to match Vodafone's PrePay Motormouth plan. It mimicks Motormouth in that the 49c calling rate applies only to landlines and Telecom mobiles. I went in to enquire about it, and the girl gave me a brochure with all the details. According to the brochure, existing prepaid customers can sign up by going to www.telecom.co.nz/matesrates and, in doing so, will receive a $10 account credit.

Don't you just love competition?

MFR001

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#8278 2-Sep-2004 10:41

Telecom has also dropped the rates on a load of business plans as of today. Yes way to go competetion

sbiddle

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#8312 6-Sep-2004 19:20

but they haven't introduced a contract deal, only prepay. shows you how dumb their marketing people are - the idea of motormouth is to to increase ARPU.

freitasm

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#8313 6-Sep-2004 19:23

Well, it will increase ARPU for the Prepay segment - which is lower than account. Perhaps they're happy with the ARPU on account, and decided to work on the prepay?

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alasta

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#8316 7-Sep-2004 08:40

I think Mauricio is right. I can vaguely recall seeing a statistic recently that 80% of mobile users are now on prepaid plans. I daresay that while the whole concept of prepaid has been a roaring success in terms of market penetration, a drop in ARPU has been the unanticipated side effect.

Raising prepaid ARPU will be a constant challenge facing mobile carriers for the forseeable future. I suspect that PXT / Photo Messaging will be successful in this regard, but I have some doubts as to whether 3G will do much good.

sbiddle

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#8321 7-Sep-2004 17:26

But the contract Motormouth plan is the first affordable true alternative to owning a landline phone in New Zealand - 200 mins per month anywhere in the country for the same price a landline costs from Telecom and the advantage of it being a mobile. While we won't be talking about hundreds of thousands of people dumping their landlines to switch to a mobile there is a substancial market there if research is anything to go by - a market Telecom obviously don't want any part of and are willing to give away to Vodafone.

Landlines connection numbers are dropping considerably in the UK and Europe because of the cost of mobile connections and Vodafone oz's launch of untimed 20c calls will do a similair thing in oz. I am just surprised Vodafone haven't specifically targeted landline users in their initial motormouth advertising but who knows what will happen in the coming months?

alasta

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#8323 7-Sep-2004 19:49

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that the 200 free minutes applies only to calls between Vodafone customers.

The discussion of landlines being replaced by mobile connections is an interesting one. Personally, I ditched my landline some time ago because the ~$35 that I would have to pay for line rental is far more than the money that I would save by making calls on the landline instead of my mobile. Considering that mobile operators offer huge amounts of off peak airtime for a minimal monthly charge, I would say that having a landline would only save money in cases where people are spending a significant amount of time on landline-landline calls during peak hours.

Apart from that, I think that a culture shift is more important than a change in pricing structures when it comes to dragging people away from their landlines.

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sbiddle

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#8360 8-Sep-2004 19:11

I stand corrected. I hadn't actually read any of the Motormouth PR stuff I had just assumed they were upsizing Get 200 by $10 and excluding calls to 025/027.

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#8363 8-Sep-2004 21:14

Not quite......

Motormouth's included minutes EXCLUDE LANDLINES! idiots.

Telecoms "Mates Rates" still charges you in those nasty full minute blocks.
Vodafones is per second after the first minute.

Vodafones TXT deals still suck.

it's a great benefit to day time customers and of little use to anyone else.

They made a blunder here. Wrong target markets. Too complicated forthe main "Pre Pay" and more incentive for a business to dump the account connection and go Pre-Pay

I'm carrying two phone to abuse the best of each deal, $10 TXT and mates rates, and "motormouth" (both pre pay phones)

$10 TXT struck just the right market for Pre Pay.