Pricing: October 2008 Archives

We've been with Vodafone Ireland for our company mobiles for several years. While we don't have any serious issues with Vodafone it's only natural that we would assess the other providers' options to see if we can save money and / or get better services.

So what are the options?

The main mobile phone companies in Ireland at present are:

• Vodafone
• O2
• Three
• Meteor

We spoke to representatives from the three main companies, so any information we have (accurate or otherwise) was supplied by them.


Vodafone:
We discovered that they had taken the liberty of adding on some extras to our account that we didn't need but were still expected to pay for.
They've also got a really annoying way of handling roaming charges. In order to avail of lower rates when abroad you seem to be lumbered with an "addon" all year round even if you're not using it. Unfortunately the way they handle the billing cycles means that anything you add or remove won't have immediate effect until the next billing cycle, which is really annoying.

Vodafone's main weakness from our perspective is data. They seem to be incapable of selling us a data bundle that we can use for the pool, but expect us to buy data plans per phone. Since our data usage fluctuates we'd end up either buying data bundles we don't need or paying excessive overages

Three
Three Ireland have a few business plans, but they are totally inflexible. While the other operators do not care how many handsets you have on your plan, Three force you to upgrade depending on the number of handsets you need regardless of the number of minutes you use.

This is very annoying.

We currently have 12 or 13 handsets, however only 4 of them are assigned to specific members of staff. The others are "pool" phones which we use for any calls being made to mobile phones.
With Three's restrictions this would force us to opt for their most expensive call plan: Business Sharer 3000 which costs EUR290 a month plus an extra EUR10 per handset.
While the plan may offer plenty of minutes etc., it is completely at odds with our usage and would cost us practically double what we should be spending. If they removed the restriction on the number of phones on the plan we could easily move to one of the lower priced plans and upgrade if needed.

O2

So far we've had two representatives from O2 come out to sell us services. Why two? Well the first one didn't even understand what O2 was offering nor could he come to grips with our usage, so we were going to simply tell O2 to get lost when they sent us someone else who actually understood their products ....

In any case O2's offerings are quite attractive in most respects.
Unlike Vodafone it seems to be relatively easy to switch stuff around as needed, though we still aren't 100% sure if the savings we might make are enough to switch provider.
The one big weak area is the iPhone.
While the other providers are more than happy to sell you pretty much any phone you like on a business plan, O2 will not let you put iPhones on a business plan. This is incredibly annoying and could be the one reason why we wouldn't switch to them.

We haven't spoken to Meteor as yet and I'm not sure if we will, as their network coverage can be quite flaky (or at least it used to be!)

So in summary:
Three - their pricing plans are too inflexible, so they are not an option
O2 - Looking good, but the iPhone (or lack of) could be a deal breaker
Vodafone - Data is the main issue