Vodafone NZ halves data roaming rates to Australia, again

Stuart Corner
Monday, 27 June 2011 17:45

Your IT - Mobility

Vodafone New Zealand has halved the price of data roaming in Australia to $NZ0.50/MB for both pre and postpay customers, claiming it to be the lowest rate available from any of New Zealand's three mobile operators.

Vodafone's general manager of consumer marketing, Kursten Shalfoon, said: "Uptake of our $1/MB roaming to Australia [introduced in May] has been strong, so we've decided to offer even better value to our customers travelling across the ditch by halving it again."

Telecom NZ charges Postpay customers $2.50/MB for the first 40MB and the next 60MB are free for the rest of the billing month. Any usage over 100MB is charged at $2.50/MB. For prepay customers the rate is $4.00/MB for the first 2.5MB with a further 7.5MB free for the rest of the billing month, and additional usage at $4.50MB. This means that the least a postpaid Telecom customer would pay would be $1/MB and a prepay customer the same.

Telecom does not alert customers when they are nearing or have reached their 100MB/10MB allowance prior to the bill cycle ending. Vodafone sends SMS notifications to customers' mobiles when they reach 2MB, 5MB and 10MB data usage.

2Degrees halved its data roaming rates to Australia May to $2.50/MB for both pre and Postpay customers.

Vodafone NZ's rate is considerably better than Vodafone AU's rate to New Zealand, and much simpler. Vodafone AU offers data bundles starting at $1.65 per MB for postpaid customers. iTWire was unable to find further details on the Vodafone AU web site.