How to waste $500M

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:24:27 +1200

I believe this was announced a while ago, but I only noticed when it was twittered today: Vodafone NZ is extending their network so that there is 900 MHz 3G coverage over much more of the country. I was quite elated reading that - the existing coverage is is not great, and it’s annoying having a very capable phone and not being able to use it as it was meant to be (especially when overpaying). However, after asking a few questions, it turns out this is actually bad news - the extended coverage won’t work with the world’s best phone (only PR people really dispute that). Since they’ve just extended the network, it seems pretty unlikely that they’re planning on a real upgrade any time soon, so this means that real coverage is further off, not closer. The release has a list of 14 phones that can be used (only 14!). These all look very uninteresting:

iPhone works fine on prepay

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:20:54 +1200

The Vodafone NZ website clearly states that the iPhone (3G) will not be “available” on Prepay. For various reasons, I swapped the SIMs in my prepay Vodafone phone and our on-contract 3G iPhone last night. The iPhone worked without any problems at all with the Prepay SIM. Phone calls and SMS worked fine, as did (as you would expect) all the non-phone features of the phone. I didn’t sync the phone, so it’s possible it’s disabled there, but that would be easy enough to work around if you had two SIMs as we do (and I doubt it actually is disabled there anyway). I didn’t try getting data (no plans are available for any Prepay customer, but the casual data is available) since we’re in a non-3G area, but I expect that also works. Possibly by “available”, they mean “available to buy” - i.e. unless you have a contact with them they won’t sell you one. However, we bought ours outright and they didn’t even get my phone number IIRC, so they had no idea if I had a contract or not. I guess they want to sell more contracts, but being honest wouldn’t really hurt that much, would it? They might even sell more phones, although maybe they don’t make much from that (I’m much more likely to get one if I can stick with my Prepay access).

3g on Tony Andrew Meyer

How to waste $500M

iPhone works fine on prepay