Vodafone 3G vs Telecom XT: review discussion

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freitasm

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#56692 21-Jan-2010 09:28

Folks, this is the thread to discuss the review posted here.

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#291744 21-Jan-2010 09:37

Steve, congratulations on what must be the most thorough review of service I've seen in a long time... Clearly we need to find you a job as you've got too much time on your hands.

well done!

cheers

Paul

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#291752 21-Jan-2010 09:48

PaulBrislen: Steve, congratulations on what must be the most thorough review of service I've seen in a long time... Clearly we need to find you a job as you've got too much time on your hands.

well done!

cheers

Paul

I'm not that keen on the marketing job any longer, apparently I'd have to move to Auckland..

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#291753 21-Jan-2010 09:49

Well done Steve

Give the man a pay rise

John

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#291758 21-Jan-2010 09:54

Yes, I can understand how you'd get used to hosing rain and wind all "summer" long... ;-)

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Ben

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#291775 21-Jan-2010 10:27

Hats off Steve. Great article.

One niggle, are the handover images transposed, or am I reading them wrong? Red is bad right, so the "reasonably good" image should be the less red of the two?

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#291776 21-Jan-2010 10:29

Ben: Hats off Steve. Great article.

One niggle, are the handover images transposed, or am I reading them wrong? Red is bad right, so the "reasonably good" image should be the less red of the two?

Oops that's definately the case. I sent freitasm a copy of the article in word with the images as an attachment, he's obviously got them the wrong way around when he's reformatted it.

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sansom

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#291784 21-Jan-2010 10:38

Yes, an excellent article Steve.

Only one small correction to the Vodafone Prepay Pricing section where you say customers can buy another data bundle "once only" in the month. On Vodafone users can buy as many prepay data bundles as they like each month. And it's 512MB on Vodafone, not 500MB for $30. In fact, one greedy customer bought over 100 512MB bundles in one month!

Hamish

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#291788 21-Jan-2010 10:42

Just one thing I didn't mention in the final review.

For testing I used a Telecom branded ZTE MF668 device for all Telecom tests and for all Vodafone tests within their 2100MHz coverage areas. Different devices can deliver slightly different performance, so using the same device ensured things were equal. Outside the Vodafone 2100MHz areas a Huawei stick supporting 900MHz UMTS was used.

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#291799 21-Jan-2010 11:00

Steve

This is great work. You have been fair, unemotional and factual. You have potential carreer in technical writing and possible journalism at your finger tips.

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#291809 21-Jan-2010 11:27

NealR: Steve

This is great work. You have been fair, unemotional and factual. You have potential carreer in technical writing and possible journalism at your finger tips.

Neal

since when did being fair unemotional and factual have anything to do with Journalism.

Great article Steve, If you are going to mke any updates it might be worth mentioning in the pricing part the bonus credit you get with XT on prepay i.e. topup $60 credit, get $20 extra. It is effectively a 25% discount (getting $80 of stuff for $60)

What would also be pretty neat is a graphical comparison of prices - a line graph with data along the x axis and cost along the Y and two lines showing what you pay on each network if you picked the optimum plan on that network for that amount of data.

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#291816 21-Jan-2010 11:34

Very nice piece of work and I second the comment about fairness and balance. It wasn't very long ago that the Opco's themselves didn't have this level of understanding about their own networks, let alone their competitors.

So now that we have two high quality mobile data networks the focus shifts to how do the networks differentiate themselves? What can either Telecom or Vodafone (or 2degrees or anyone else) do to make users (or specific user groups) want to use them?

- Network: speed and coverage have relative parity between TC & VF
- Pricing: has come down a lot on both networks and there will be tit for tat moves & special offers going forward but unlikely to be any major differences
- Devices: now that Telecom is WCDMA we can expect much closer parity on devices, again there might be some minor differences until 850+9003G becomes standard (next 12-24mnths) and there will be specific exclusives from time to time. Of course the iPhone is the elephant in the room exception to this currently but that will likely change at some point in the future.

If all of the above are on parity then I think the areas of differentiation have to be around Sales and Support experience. Making sure customers get the right device for what they want to do, showing them how to use some of the newer online services when mobile or how these services might be more valuable when they are mobile, providing high quality support when there are problems etc.

Of course the challenge for the carriers is how to build a business case around offering such 'intangible' features...

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#291817 21-Jan-2010 11:35

Great review! and i love the fact you didn't just post speedtest.net results. One interesting thing to see would be a video streaming comparison as that is where consistent throughput and performance is required and it is more bandwidth intensive than VoIP.
You tube for an international site and TVNZ on demand for a NZ site would be my first thoughts.

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#291818 21-Jan-2010 11:38

sansom:

In fact, one greedy customer bought over 100 512MB bundles in one month!

Wouldn't that be "one highly engaged and very highly valued customer..."

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#291821 21-Jan-2010 11:52

NonprayingMantis: Great article Steve, If you are going to mke any updates it might be worth mentioning in the pricing part the bonus credit you get with XT on prepay i.e. topup $60 credit, get $20 extra. It is effectively a 25% discount (getting $80 of stuff for $60)

That's actually a very good point that I didn't consider.

If you were a prepaid $29.95 data user on Telecom and topped up with combinations of $20 or $40 then you are actually getting between 25% and 30% better value, the net effect being your effectively paying somewhere in the vicinity of $20 - $22.50 for that 512MB of data which makes it considerably better value.

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#291827 21-Jan-2010 12:03

Great work Steve.
Interesting to see I'm not the only person that thinks you are, or would be, a great investigative tech journalist :)

kind regards Andrew TD

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