Source: BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7564787.stm

Vodafone price rises under attack

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The National Consumer Council (NCC) has criticised Vodafone for increasing mobile phonecall costs without telling its customers.

Vodafone plans to raise minimum call charges by 25%.

But a letter inserted into July's bills stated the new price list but failed to mention they were going up.

Vodafone has said it has improved its call packages for contract customers and it expects "99% of users will see less than a 10% rise in their bills".

It says it needs to raise prices to cover the cost of connecting to non-geographic numbers such as 0845 and 0800, and because the European Commission has made firms cut the cost of calls made from overseas.

Headline tariffs

Vodafone is not changing its headline tariff rates and the increased charges, effective from 1 September, apply to both contract and pay-as-you-go customers.

Minimum call charges are rising by 25% and calls to 08 numbers, including 0800 and 0845, will be rising by more than 30%.

Vodafone said it let customers know that changes were afoot through texts and their bills.

The company says its new improved price plans, with extra texts and minutes for contract customers, will help absorb some of the increase.

A Vodafone spokeswoman said: "This is the first time in over two years we have done this and 02 and T-Mobile have already done it earlier this year.

"If people are significantly impacted, we will work with them to find the right price plan."

[…]
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It seems as though this is just to make up for reductions elsewhere. The perception is that people don't tend to be aware of exact 08xx costs, but of those to "standard" landline and mobile calls (when calling from a mobile).

Not sure how it costs Vodafone more to connect to a 0800 number than a 01/02/03 one. 

Source: Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/aug/19/vodafonegroup.telecoms

Mobile phones: Vodafone lifts charges to recoup lost earnings
Richard Wray
The Guardian,
Tuesday August 19 2008

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Prices for Vodafone's pay-as-you-go service will rise by a third next month as it becomes the latest operator to try to claw back some of the revenues lost through increased regulation.

The move will heap further pain on consumers who face a winter of financial strain from increased household bills. Food prices have risen more than 13%, according to the government figures; British Gas has raised gas prices by 35% and the water companies have admitted that the average bill will increase faster than inflation. Inflation is running at a 16-year high of 4.4% and is expected to hit 5% in the autumn.

Vodafone, Britain's second-largest mobile phone company, has just under 11 million pay-as-you-go - or pre-pay - customers, who will see the cost of calling increase from 15p a minute to 20p from September. The company is also raising the cost of calling for any of its 7.5 million contract customers who exceed their monthly limits, from 12p a minute to 15p a minute.

It is also increasing the cost of calling 0871 numbers to 35p from 25p a minute while the cost of phoning the 0870 numbers used by many call centres and often chargeable from mobile phones will rise from 15p to 20p a minute.

Vodafone's rises come after rivals O2 and T-Mobile increased their prices back in July. T-Mobile raised its prepaid minimum call charge from 10p to between 15p and 25p, depending on which tariff the customer is on.

Market leader O2, meanwhile, increased its minimum call charge for pay-as-you-go customers who have not upgraded to a new tariff from 10p to 20p. It has 11.5 million pre-pay customers. Its new prices apply to all calls to standard UK landlines and UK mobiles, as well as international numbers and those starting with prefixes such as 0845.

Orange, meanwhile, has kept its prices for callers on its Racoon and older pre-pay tariffs at 15p a minute, while the price of calling on its newer pre-pay tariffs - such as Camel - are 20p a minute.

Contract customers who make calls outside their allowance to a landline or other Orange customer are charged 12p a minute, while calls to other networks cost 35p a minute.

Vodafone said it has not increased its charges for about two years and that only part of the reason for the price rises was "regulation".

Industry observers believe the operators want to push up charges to recoup some money being lost as regulators cap prices.

The cost of making a call while overseas has been hammered by EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding, but roaming calls make up a fraction of the operators' revenues. Far more important are so-called mobile termination rates - the charges mobile networks levy on one another and fixed-line operators to call mobiles - which account for about 20% of revenues and have become the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny in recent months.

Last year regulator Ofcom introduced a new set of price caps that slashed prices by between 10% and 45% for Britain's five networks - O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and 3 - to between 5.1p and 5.9p a minute.

More recently Reding has suggested rates should come down by 70% to 2p or less.
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Source: Mobile

http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/Vodafone_stays_firm_on_recent_price_increases.html

Vodafone stays firm on recent price increases for customer contracts
03/09/2008 11:50:33

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Customers wanting to cancel contracts told they won’t be able to

Vodafone is rejecting requests from customers who want to leave the network in light of its recent price increases.

It was alleged by The Independent newspaper earlier this week that Vodafone was resisting what the newspaper considered to be ‘lawful claims’ from Vodafone customers to cancel their mobile phone contracts under the operator’s own terms and conditions.

Vodafone’s terms state that contract customers who face over a 10% rise in their bills are allowed to discontinue their contract with the operator, regardless of when they first signed up.

However, Vodafone said that the allegations were ‘misrepresentative’. A spokeswoman said that ‘99% of Vodafone customers will see a less than 10% change to their bill’, so wouldn’t be within their rights to demand cancelling their contracts.

[…]
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How on earth do you prove that your bill has cost 10% or more than it would have done under previous charging arrangements?

At the end of the article it says 3 has ditched per-second billing. What a rip off!