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A 1,300 percent price rise from Vodafone?

For many years now I've been a relatively happy Vodafone customer.

No, I still get my internet services from Spark because, aside from a handful of occasions, they've delivered satisfactory service for an acceptable price -- but for cellular voice/SMS Vodafone has delivered just fine.

Until yesterday.

I use a couple of systems that generate automated SMS messages, but only occasionally.

To keep costs and complexity to a minimum, I've been using pre-paid Vodafone SIMs on an old plan that allowed me to simply top up once a year and then pay $0.20 per SMS message until the credit was exhausted.

This was entirely satisfactory and allowed me to run these systems for $20 a year.

Yesterday I went to top up the SIM cards in these units for another 12 months and found I couldn't.

It seems that Vodafone decided, without warning, to cancel the plan to which these SIM cards were connected -- without warning or without any sensible alternative plan being available.

The only pre-pay plans now available require monthly top-ups, regardless of whether you've sent any SMS messages and the top-up is $24.

This forced change of plan would mean that instead of paying just $20 a year, I'd now be paying $288 a year *and* I'd have to remember to top up every month as well -- or the service would be stopped.

Since I run two of these systems I'd have to find an extra $576 a year just to continue using Vodafone as my cellular provider.

Bugger that for a joke!

So, yesterday I reconfigured everything to operate over the Net using IP packets instead of SMS messages. This means I'll be paying Skinny (a Spark subsidiary) around $600 per year for wireless broadband but I was already doing that anyway so there's effectively no *extra* cost to me.

I find it hard to believe that Vodafone wasn't making money out of the old plan these systems were on, given that over the years I'd paid more than $200 to send what amounted to probably 40 or 50 SMS messages. Now, they won't get one red cent from me so it's their loss I guess.

So all in all I would have to say that yesterday was probably the busiest, most exciting, most physically fatiguing day I've had in many years. The need to suddenly convert a couple of systems from SMS to IP was just a tiny fraction of the stuff I ended up being involved in.

Unfortunately I can't talk about the biggest bit of excitement but suffice to say it was pretty scary with a heart-stopping moment (figuratively), albeit with a happy ending.

Feeling a bit sore today however, yet feeling not too bad as I close in on the 70th anniversary of my birth. Glad to be alive and still planning to live forever or to die trying!

Carpe Diem folks!

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