Another mobile data plan that misses the point: Vodafone launches new tariff with day of free browsing

As a celebration of it’s new data tariff, Vodafone UK is offering all of it’s customers free mobile web browsing and email all day tomorrow. You can browse and email to your hearts content, and not get charged a penny. The new tariff being ushered in is the “50p per day” plan, which will give customers a 25MB data limit every day for just 50p. Good value? Yes, but it’s the kind of treatment of mobile data that drives users away from their mobile browsers.

From Vodafone:

“From 1 May 2009 we’re changing our pay as you browse day rate to just 50p a day - and increasing the daily limit to 25MB. A day is calculated from midnight to midnight. And you only pay for the days you browse… The 50p daily rate gives you up to 25MB data per day. Most customers never reach this limit. If you’re a very heavy user, and you exceed this limit, you may be charged for your extra usage.”

What we think?

Hey, 50p per day isn’t bad - it’s even better since Vodafone doesn’t charge you for the days where you don’t connect. With a package like this, you can pay nothing to do no browsing! Which is exactly the problem - this package rewards people for not using the mobile Internet, when we should be encouraging people to get on-line over their devices.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean: to keep your data usage low, Vodafone offers arcane tidbits like “4MB per minute is a good rule of thumb” for mobile video - how the hell is a regular mobile Internet user meant to know how many MB per minute a video they’re viewing is? It even has a link to a MB Usage Calculator, where a variety of sliding bars let you know what your average data usage might be, on average, for a certain selection of services:

…. good God. No wonder people don’t like using the mobile Internet. Could we just get some unlimited data plans so we don’t have to worry about crap like this? Honestly, Vodafone, people will pay for unlimited data usage.