Vodafone Romania has launched a suite of plans called “Red,” aimed at both residential and business customers and available through 15 May 2013, with a two-year contract. For residential subscribers, the operator offers three plans, with smartphone, priced at €29, €45 and €65. (Monthly fees are lower without the phone.) All three “Red” plans include unlimited calls and SMS to all national networks and unlimited calls to fixed networks in Europe and to fixed and mobile networks in the U.S. and Canada. They also provide up to 4 GB of data, up to 250 minutes of calls to mobile international networks and up to 50 GB of storage space with Vodafone Cloud. For corporate customers, there are four plans, with monthly fees ranging from €25 to €85. These offer unlimited calling to all national networks and to fixed networks in Europe, unlimited national SMS and up to 4GB of data.

Tarifica’s Take

The offer of 250 minutes of international calls to mobile networks should be enticing to consumers and businesses alike. And considering the fact that cross-border communications are on the increase worldwide, we think that mobile operators in general would be well advised to include free international minutes, to the extent possible.

But we are especially enthusiastic about Vodafone’s offer of 50 GB of storage space in the cloud. It clearly shows the forward-looking, creative nature of this company. We have been stressing the importance of cloud services for a while now, both in past issues of the Story of the Week and also directly to our clients. Cloud storage and services are no longer just some nice add-ons, but instead are an essential feature of today’s mobile environment. Consumers need the cloud to store music and games, along with web data they have downloaded to their smartphones and tablets. In many cases, the latter becomes so large that it threatens to overwhelm or at least overtax the storage space on these mobile devices. Business users, of course, can use/create vast quantities of data and having access to additional storage space in the cloud is considered by many, if not most, to be a necessity.

In summary, every mobile operator should bundle a cloud component in its consumer and business plans if it wants to remain competitive in today’s rapidly changing mobile landscape.