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——— Website no longer shows 4MB free. Disregard deal, Vodafone has cancelled it. ———
Vodafone has recently changed the way they bill data on their Pay as You Go Plus prepaid plan. Minimum recharge amount is $10 and credit expires in a year (can be rolled over). This bargain is for people who have fairly LOW DATA USAGE, or people with usually low usage and occasionally high or very high usage (read further down).
Old billing: "2c per MB, charged per 512KB, first 512KB in each data session free"
New billing: "2c per MB, charged per 512KB, first 4MB in each data session free"
This is in all respects cheaper than the old way of billing.
I am still on a recharge from the old billing, and inside the vodafone app you can see each data session and the credit charge associated with it. It seems the app shows 1000KB of usage as "1.00MB", yet billing is actually "2c per 1024KB charged per 512KB". I must assume "4MB free" is really 4096KB free.
Data session?
Determining when data sessions reset is a bit tricky, since every phone and every carrier is different, but generally it can happen after set periods of time, idle time, moving between towers, losing reception, turning mobile data off, switching to wifi, restarting/aeroplane mode. There is some speculation in this whirlpool thread.
From my understanding, throughout a day if you're connected to mobile data you will probably have a lot of sessions.
Gimme a scenario
Let's assume you use 100MB (100,000KB) a week, and you're the kind that generally uses it for instant messaging, and quick browsing sessions. To be super conservative, Sat and Sun will only have 1 data session each, and the weekdays will have 3 each, with data split evenly. Sat & Sun will be 8MB and 4MB usage, and the 5 weekdays will be 2 days of 14MB, 2 days of 18MB, and 1 day of 24MB. = 100MB over 7 days.
Da maths results
- 8000KB
Old billing: 15c
New billing: 8c - 4000KB
Old billing: 7c
New billing: 0c - 4667KB * 3
Old billing: 9c * 3 = 27c
New billing: 2c * 3 = 6c - 4667KB * 3
Old billing: 9c * 3 = 27c
New billing: 2c * 3 = 6c - 6000KB * 3
Old billing: 11c * 3 = 33c
New billing: 4c * 3 = 12c - 6000KB * 3
Old billing: 11c * 3 = 33c
New billing: 4c * 3 = 12c - 8000KB * 3
Old billing: 15c * 3 = 45c
New billing: 8c * 3 = 24c
And finally
Total 100MB (100,000KB)
Old billing total cost: $1.87 = avg rate of $18.70 per GB
New billing total cost: $0.68 = avg rate of $6.80 per GBIn other words, with that level of usage, with a $10 recharge:
Old billing: 5.35 weeks, 534.759MB
New billing: 14.7 weeks, 1470.588MB
And the value could be much greater too, depending on your particular low usage patterns. Or it could be worse, it depends :) .
tl;dr It's cheaper because of the free 4MB each data session, which can make up quite a lot overall. Good for people who mostly stick to instant messaging and just want to be connected.
But does this suit someone who has occasionally high usage? Like when tethering, weekends or on boring occasions?
It does actually… At any time you can purchase a 2GB data pack for $3 (edit: can use prepaid credit if you txt https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/289837#comment-4399519 ). This 2GB pack claims to last 1 day, but it actually means 1 day from the end of the CURRENT day. e.g. If you purchased it at 6AM on a Saturday, it would expire after 42 hours, at 12AM on Monday. There are other packs too, like 2GB over "7 days" for $7. http://www.vodafone.com.au/prepaid/add-ons . They roll-over too when you buy another add-on with the same "day"-tier.
In the above scenario, if you bought a pack every Saturday when you woke up, you would have an extra 2GB to use every weekend. Over 28 days you would have spent $14.40 for up to 8.368GB
And if you were the type to only need to buy one of the add-ons every 28 days, then you would have up to 2.4GB of data for $5.72
Effectively the rate of using these add-ons is $1.50 per GB, AND it's prepaid. If you're a heavy data user, this is probably the best value on prepaid at the moment. Just remember to flick into aeroplane mode and back to force-reset a data session after you buy the add-on or it won't start drawing from it!
Call rates are 20c a minute, and SMS is 20c each. Not the best value there I suppose, but not terrible. There is the option of using voip to save more on calls. siptalk on whirlpool offer 1.65c per minute to landlines and 6.6c per minute to mobiles. If you chose a low-bitrate codec it would be possible to keep short phone calls to under 4096KB. :>
edit: Oh actually they have a talk add-on, 100 minutes for $5 with 28 day expiry. So if you talk a fair amount that's also an option, if you used all of it then that's 5c per minute calls.
I hope I explained that okay. :)
NOTE: Users are reporting that the new billing hasn't come into effect for their accounts yet.
+1 for the detailed post.