Discuss: giffgaff Questions and Discussions

[ethani99]

Some good points on this thread and although we do have the first 6 months free data usage I'm sure most of us would like giffgaff to at least match the cheapest competitor with data pricing as it does with calls and texts (same as ASDA Mobile). I've been checking the pricing plans of alot of different Network Providers and seem to have found the best price plan currently available. Again ASDA Mobile top the cheapest list by offering 20p/MB but to me this is still pretty expensive and as we're a "People Powered Mobile Network" I'd like to see giffgaff do something special with the data pricing. Maybe 10p/MB as a standard price or a bundle/add-on of £5 for 1GB which only needs to be topped up every 3 months. Now this would definitely appeal to me and at the same time keep everything simple too. Let me know if you agree and it'd be good to hear from the Giff-Staffers too just to see what they think of this as well. Kudos is more than welcome! Cheers, Ethani99.

[pinkllama]

i think it should be kept as simple as possible.

how about £5 pm for 'unlimited' data (2gb per month?)

free data for the month if you top up £15/£20

simples

[rstonehouse]

Sounds good - but it shouldn't exceed Asda mobiles existing 20p/Mb I would additionally differentiate with: some free services (google mail mobile app/twitter app/opera mini to the opera proxies) automatically applied bundles (i.e. you do not have to register first; the price caps at set tiers as you use more data)

[simon69c]

I would certainly consider £1 / week to be reasonable and perhaps with a FUP of about 250-500MB.  I think this method is much more straight forward than a per-MB charge, especially considering how many phones use the net quite extensively these days.  It should also cut down on customer service interaction with people wanting to chase down every last MB that came out of their balance.

If there was demand for heavier net usage then this could be dealt with by a separate monthly charge, perhaps in conjunction with monthly voice/text bundles.

[ragnorak]

1. First you need a 'standard' price, one that will act as a safety net for those who haven't bought a bundle or earned free data as a top-up reward. I'd suggest this could be 30p for 40mb per day. For those who go over the limit then another 30p becomes payable automatically.

2. If Giffgaff is going to make money there ought to be an incentive to top-up regularly. As this network is likely to become popular with those seeking free WAP over the next 5 months, I think it'd be a great idea to keep them on board by offering a free bundle of data allowance worth 1GB lasting one month for every £10 topped-up. If someone's top-ups reach £20 in the same month then their data allowance will be rolled over up to 2GB and the expiry date extended for a further month, and so on. This would be similar to the 3 network's system where data bundles are queued if you buy several at once. You could call it a Data Bank perhaps.

3. With these limits in place I think the rules on tethering could be relaxed, as people would have to pay more for using larger amounts of data anyway.

[andy0]

There seem to be quite a few people hoping for relatively large bundles of data per day or week or month, with conditions that might get a bit complicated to follow or to program

We've seen from the start, in interviews quoted before launch, that the giffgaff management had ideas of basing the brand on clear and simple tariffs, and I'm going to suggest following that pattern

How about a very simple 1p per megabyte?

That's not so dissimilar in effect from roughly pro rata with bundles on some other networks, for example 30p a day for 25 MB fair use, or 50p for ... I'm not going to look up every single one to check. At higher levels of use, but staying linear, 500 MB would still be fairly reasonable at £5.

For very modest data users on those other networks, and there are still some, getting lumbered for a daily fee of 30 or 50p or £1 is quite frustrating if they only use 1.5k or 6k or 20k via a very basic wap page, and you can sometimes read them wanting to swap to another network which still charges pro-rata.

Yes, with more and more 3g browsing, and with video and audio streaming that some people have mentioned here, some people's use is going up a lot, but so far we aren't talking about giffgaff launching mobile broadband as well. But even there, we can see £5 to £15 a month for one to a few gigabytes, which is still in roughly the same price range..

It's not unprecedented to charge data like this. A German SIM I have recently sent an email about a promotion for December of 1 cent per megabyte. I've noticed a network in the Channel Islands charges 1 penny per megabyte.

There might be issues about whether the data would be calculated as an aggregate or per each connection. I know that on O2 contract they seem to add the data for the day and that shows as one line on the bill. But prepaid, you can't let it wait. However I'm sure the programming team could sort out charging each new megabyte as it starts

So again, how about 1p per megabyte? Or if that can't be the exact price, something as straightforward.

[bigfatbball2]

really nice idea andy0

It sounds great, reaches the cost of packages without the need of having any Fair Usage Policy, and keeps it all simple.

Only question is can giffgaff pull off such low prices when they usually are of 20p/MB outside of unlimited data packages.

Under such an offer it seems logical tethering should be authorized as charged perMB anyway

[ragnorak]

1p per MB sounds nice and simple on the face of it, but in practice it could become a bit of a distraction. Even if Giffgaff sort it out so that you won't get charged 1p every time you make a connection, we've become used to the comfort of having a (reasonably) 'unlimited' amount of data to play with so that we don't have to be too self-conscious about how many pages we load or failed downloads etc. Also looking at it from a business point of view such a way of charging would make customers more inclined to ration their usage which means the network might not make enough money from it. I still think the best way to go would be a free amount based on your top-ups, even say 512MB for a £10 top-up or 1GB for £15 (with further top-ups simply counting towards the following month), backed up by a 30p per day cap (perhaps each day could start with a 10p per MB charge until 30p is hit to appease those who only browse a few pages).

[sloz]

Have the standard 1p per mb. But also have a monthly add on for say 5pound of 7.50 for 2gb and 3gb respectively.(or would this drain the resources too much) If you dont youl lose a lot of people to 3 and tmob who have joined as much for the internet as the call and texts. Btw 3 charge 5pound for 2gb and tmob 5pound for 3gb or 20pound for 6 month. Im sure you want to encourage people to top up monthly. Rather than 3 monthly

[dcjlegrand]

All these monthly data bundles or "x-for-topping-up" are nice ideas, but frankly, I think they go against what seem to be the fundamental principles of GG. If you look on the homepage, there are only three prices visible in clear yellow boxes - "Free" (GG2GG), "4p" (texts) and "8p" (calls). This is the way it should be and I think that no other network in the UK (or Europe) can claim to have such an incredibly basic PAYG pricing structure. Of course, GG is partly about being cheaper than the competition, but it's also supposed to be different - it's supposed to be simple. If you want data for peanuts on a monthly bundle, go to T-Mobile.

I really believe there should only be one small addition to the GG homepage and that is just ONE more yellow box next to the existing three, with "Xp /mb" in it. What we should be discussing here is the value of X.

Personally, I would be happy to see 2-5p /mb as a price. 1p/mb as has been suggested would be gloriously cheap, but would probably attract far too much abuse and might not be sustainable financially. 10p or more /mb would still be very reasonable compared to PAYG data on many networks I know, however, it would quickly get very expensive for data power users, particularly if there are not going to be data bundles, etc (which I believe there probably shouldn't be).