Vodafone: 10 Million Sign Up For New Roaming Price Package

LONDON -(Dow Jones)- Vodafone Group said Tuesday that 10 million of its customers have signed up for Vodafone Passport, Vodafone's roaming service which enables customers to take their domestic price plan abroad for a small connection fee per call.

The company said this represents more than a third of all roaming customers having taken up the service since its launch in May 2005, with more than 150,000 customers are joining Vodafone Passport every week.

The service was developed to meet customer demands for better value roaming with clear and simple pricing. The company's data for June and July 2006 shows that Passport customers are paying around 50% less per minute for their voice roaming calls when compared to the average cost of roaming in Summer 2005.

Vodafone said the average cost of a voice roaming call for these customers is now below EUR 0.45 per minute.

Following the company's May 2006 commitment to reduce the average cost of roaming by 40% by April 2007 when compared to Summer 2005, Vodafone confirmed Tuesday that average roaming prices for all Vodafone roaming customers were already over 20% lower during June and July 2006 compared to Summer 2005.

The company also said it has agreement with other operators to reduce wholesale prices to EUR 0.45 per minute or less on a reciprocal basis and that the operators with whom it has such agreement represent more than 50% of Vodafone's European wholesale traffic.

This follows Vodafone's May 2006 commitment to offer reduced wholesale rates to enable better value roaming for all mobile customers across Europe.

In addition Vodafone said it intends to launch a roaming price text information service across its European markets before Summer 2007. The service will be modelled on Vodafone UK's existing service, which enables customers to send a short text message to receive information about the cost of making a call or sending a text in the country they are visiting.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires"

Posted to the site on 19th September 2006