14 DAY TRIAL // Mobile operator Vodafone has recently announced its plans to introduce a new pricing model for data that will be put into application starting with the 1st of June.
Reportedly, customers that will use less than 0.5 MB per day will be charged a penny for every 5kb used (which means ?2 per MB). After that, the next 14.5 MB would be free, and if passing that limit as well, the customer would go back to being charged a penny for every 5kb.
While this sounds quite ok, the main issue here is that VoIP and P2P services are not included and will be billed separately.
So is this an anti-VoIP initiative or what? Vodafone has also stripped the new Nokia N95 of its VoIP capabilities recently, and as much as the mobile operator would like to sustain that making VoIP less affordable or not at all usable is not what it's doing, all the recent information proves otherwise.
The huge downside of Vodafone's new pricing model is that both VoIP and P2P services are excluded from the offer, being billed separately at ?2 a megabyte with a minimum of 5 pence per session. So far, it is unclear what can be defined as P2P, but Vodafone is currently including instant messenger services, text messaging clients and file sharing.
So, basically, can this mean that one web browsing will be included in the pricing model? Vodafone hasn't yet announced how it plans to identify VoIP and P2P traffic. While it has let everyone know that it plans to offer a new Internet tariff, details regarding it are close to non-existent.