Vodafone will introduce shared plans by the middle of this year, signalling an imminent shake-up of mobile phone plan pricing across the major telcos in Australia.
Vodafone Australia CEO Iñaki Berroeta today confirmed the telco would soon introduce a way for multiple people to share a single pool of mobile inclusions and a single bill at the end of the month.
This is significantly different to the way other Optus and Telstra currently allow customers to share data between different devices. Instead, Vodafone Shared Plans will be like what telcos in the U.S. describe as ‘family plans’.
“What we’re talking about is really sharing plans, to optimise the allowance different members of a family has each month, so in the end it is not just shared data, it’s shared plans.” said Berroeta, explaining the difference between what his team is planning and what is currently available through his competitors.
Shared plans make up the majority of telco offerings in the U.S., where the major wireless providers has plans including unlimited calls and text and up to 80GB of 4G data each month, to be shared by up to 10 different customers. Vodafone customers can expect this enhanced offering sometime in the first half of 2015.
Vodafone’s commitment to Family Plans has the potential to produce a tidal wave of change in the way we choose and pay for phone plans by the end of the year. The shift to Shared Plans is significant enough that Telstra and Optus will be all-but forced to follow suit, despite neither telco suggesting this direction for future phone plans yet.
As evidence, look at what happened when Vodafone introduced $5 per day international roaming on its signature Red Plans. Despite having the fewest customers of the big telcos in Australia, once Vodafone added cheaper roaming to post-paid plans, Telstra and Optus followed with significantly cheaper roaming offers within a year.
“[$5 per day roaming] is not just something that has benefitted Vodafone customers, but is something that has had a benefit on the [Australian telco] industry as a whole, for all consumers” said Berroeta.
“One of our key aims…in 2014 was to be an innovator in the market.”
In line with these aims, Berroeta referenced Data Workout, a plan feature offering new post-paid customers two months of unlimited data use to figure out how much they need for the remainder of their contract.
These innovations, and Vodafone’s continuing network expansion, seem to be paying dividends with customers with the telco reporting an 80 percent drop in customers complaints in 2014, and an increase of 16 points in its Net Promotor Score (NPS).
Joseph Hanlon
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