After 3’s X-Series plans hit the market a few weeks ago, it was only a matter of time before other phone companies soiled themselves scrambled to offer some competitive data pricing.
So Virgin Mobile has popped up with a $10 / 1GB data deal. It doesn’t have all those extras like X-Series, but this is cheaper and if you have the handset to do the job, this will do very nicely for most users who aren’t chasing the Skype and the IM features. (Everything else on X-Series is pretty available on standard data, or, like Orb, isn’t quite delivering a killer experience just yet.)
So thanks Virgin, and kudos again, 3, for kicking the industry out of their disgusting data price schemes — before this, Virgin were charging sorry, the worst on the market was charging more like $22,000 / 1GB. That kind of pricing is really asking your customers to eat shit and like it. Now we’re just awaiting Telstra and Optus (who do Virgin’s back-end) to stop treating customers like dirt on the data front.
The clock is ticking… any bets on how long they make us wait?
UPDATE: Worth noting the excess use rate is STILL $15,000 per GB! I’ve sent a query to Virgin asking for a comment on having such an excess rate attached to this otherwise very good data plan.
UPDATE 2: Virgin told us:
We believe that our customers are responsible individuals that will be aware of what data they are downloading and won’t go silly, if they do we have the following in place.
Customers receive an SMS when they reach 75% to 90% of their credit limit, encouraging them to call us. If they ignore these SMS messages, their ability to incur further charges is put on hold (so they can still receive, but not make calls, essentially). So customers can never exceed their credit limits, so will never get a by now almost mythical $15,000 bill…
Virgin Mobile launches $10 for 1GB plans [APC Mag]