'Free TXTing nailed our network'......

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#15330 7-Jun-2005 12:53

John r - there are mistakes and there are outages - people are understanding of such.
but, having free unlimited text messaging every weekend seems to be a self inflicted outage, and i can't understand why voda didn't for see it.

so, it seems one of the following must be true:
A) They wrongly thought their network could handle it.
B) They under-estimated demand.
C) They thought sms delays/outages over the weeked were acceptable.

i'm thinking option B is the most likely. i'm hoping it's not C

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#15363 8-Jun-2005 10:37

And is it really that smart to be advertising free weekends, when they must know by now that they can't handle / provide an adequate service? I understand teething problems with new promotions, but I think it's a bit dumb to be promoting when the teething problems are so bad!

Voda used to be smarter than this! Did Tim Miles really have all the smarts? Cos it seems they have gone from good, to very poor since he left!

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#15373 8-Jun-2005 11:54

Both outages have been in Wellington,
Could this represent issues in Wellington alone with the network.
Or possibly too many people texting too much in Wellington.
Free text as with uncapped $10 text creates overuse, it was seen in the first weekend with that stupid spam message.

I see that the overloading in Rotorua from the Lions game is conceivable considering most roamers will be on gsm hence vf here.

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#16010 27-Jun-2005 12:52

How you can under-estimate demand puzzles me (first post so go easy on me!) for two reasons:

1) they saw what happened with $10 uncapped 027 texts
2) They charge 20 cents a text through the week, and of course people are going to lap it up while they are free. Telecom/Boost with $10Txt have nothing to differentiate the timing of their service; it's the same no matter when.

Of course people are going to text more on weekends.

I suspect vodafone must be running this promotion to an inch of it's allowed budget as they didn't give us friday nights (bastards) and they seem to be getting somewhat worried about the amount being sent.

Of course, if they are losing money, they must stop the promotion.

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#16011 27-Jun-2005 13:57

Its nice to see the maturity of spam-happy kids has increased, for the last couple of weekends I have yet to get 'If you pass this on to 10 people, voda will reward you greatly'-type messages.

Though sometimes I wonder what the 'excessive usage' rate is and what happens if you cross this unknown line (not that I spam).

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taniwha

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#16012 27-Jun-2005 14:02

i forwarded to 100 people, but i never recieved my 60 million euros... I'm very disappointed in vodafone's broken promise.

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1275GT

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#16020 27-Jun-2005 15:21

Hehehe.

Acceptable usage is probably something abhorently low, isn't their texting plan limited to 150 messages a month?

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#16027 27-Jun-2005 16:26

Yeah I think so.

Motormouth postpaid has 200 vf-vf sms messages though and probably cheaper call costs too.

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johnr

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#16030 27-Jun-2005 16:47

and 200 anytime minutes VF to VF and calls to land lines are 49 cents per min (anywhere in NZ)

taniwha

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#16032 27-Jun-2005 17:27

150 sms is pretty low.
i'm not a big sms user, but i'm using 300+ a month without trying.

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#16039 27-Jun-2005 17:52

I send about 30 odd for the whole month

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#16040 27-Jun-2005 17:54

I used to be a big texter at 400-odd messages a month. (Whilst still uncapped).

Nowadays I send around 150 a month. The initial buzz of all this low cost txting wears off after a while for some people i suspect.

I agree with previous comments - I stated way back in post # 3 on this thread that they should have learnt from Telecoms mistakes.

"an inch of their budget" - nahhh... deep pockets is what ol' red has got. They could probably run free weekend txting until they decide on a better deal (just like Telecom extending $10 txt).

Both companies trying to win a battle that cant -really- be won outright. (Maybe with enough tens of millions of promo money and a lot of time and creativity).

taniwha

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#16041 27-Jun-2005 17:58

depends who are you corresponding with by sms.

i have 20+ friends on 027.
we often plan to do stuff together and then wonder why the 021 users never turn up.. we forget to sms them about it.
Those vfone users seldom reply to our 1 word messages.

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#16043 27-Jun-2005 18:02

I dont have any friends left on 021. Txting in our household is mainly for communication to/from deaf people.

Vodafones current Motormouth promos and free weekend texting probably amount to be similar to $10 txt anyway. They wont copy $10 txt though, god forbid they should be the market followers in anything they have control over (unlike their 3G rollout and data speeds).

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#16044 27-Jun-2005 19:16

I probably send 30-50 sms messages per month, most during the weekdays. I usually only text my girlfriend or my flatmates, so during the weekend they are usually home thus don't need to waste text messages. For me, prepay probably suit me due to low usage.

(Switching to 027 might be an option next time phone purchasing comes around but I perfer to have the option of buying the handset overseas and also not being forced to roam when going overseas too.... again - I'll probably look at telecom offerings next time)

Quite a few people I knew at Massey would text each other instead of speaking (they were sitting across from each other) due to the free text weekends.

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