Virgin hails 'free' landline-to-mobe calls
Keeping it in the family
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Virgin Media is to offer customers free calls from their Virgin landlines to their Virgin mobile phones. As always, strings are attached.
Strictly free calls are reserved for the upcoming weekend-only 'Size M' plan. Add weekday evenings into the mix for 'Size L' and you pay £3.45 a month. For the 24/7 'Size XL' tariff you pay £7.95. Line rental for all three tariffs is £11.99 a month.
Not so much free, more certainty of charges - and reasonable charges, at that. This plays well to consumer psychology, accustomed as we all are to the outrageous prices that operators dream up when we call mobile phones from our landlines. UK landline-to-mobile call traffic drums up £1.6bn a year in operator revenues, according to Virgin, which presumably picks up a pleasing chunk of this. So why should it torpedo such a nice not so little earner?
The answer lies in Virgin's ambitions to build a quad play UK telco, straddling TV, cable and ADSL broadband, mobile and fixed telephony. The company may lose a little in individual elements of the bundle but it makes much more money in the long run: people who choose all four services are very profitable and less susceptible, we suspect, to "churning" than single-service rates tarts.
Virgin's recruiting sergeants have some work to do: the company has half a million, quad-play customers, compared with more than four million home phone customers and 10 million customers in total.
COMMENTS
28 quid a month?
Be will do you 24down/1 up for 17.50 (to be fair, I get about 16-18 down, 1 up) whilst cheerfully repeat billing your card, not charging you a fiver for the privilege all the while. You can also ring them up for nowt if it goes wrong, at which point a person will answer the phone and politely try to fix it for you, in a refreshingly helpful and intelligent manner The Post Office will do you a phone line for a tenner. None of this money will go towards supporting the appalling, overpriced clusterfuck that is Virgin.
This is a Good Thing.
Charged for the Incomings
Junk calls arent really a problem over this side, and we have the 'telephone preference service' which can help alot if you are getting calls.
aside from this, I just cannot get my head around how it was ever acceptable to be charged for receiving incoming calls AND Texts, so much so it seems to be the norm.
Richard vs Rupert
Fine. Wonderful. Great. Now if only their broadband didn't stink of "Big Brother knows best" then I'd be on them like a shot. As it is I hold my nose and go with Sky, then have a long shower because I feel all dirty at boosting the Digger's empire.
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