MELBOURNE: Virgin Mobile has launched the new data rollover mobile plan in Australia for its valued customers keeping in view the suggestion give by the users. Virgin Mobile makes it optional for all the customers either they want to switch to new mobile plan or not. Customers who want to use new rollover plan can update their existing plans those who don’t want new plan, there is no need to update their plan.
“We believe that there’s been a calling for data rollover for sometime,” David Scribner, chief executive of Virgin Mobile, told Fairfax Media in an interview.
He said there were no caveats apart from the fact data would only rollover to the next month.
“Our rollover is monthly, so we give customers a second chance to use their data,” he said.
Consumer groups Choice and the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network have both previously said that the introduction of rollover services, introduced by United States telcos T-Mobile and AT&T in December and January, should be introduced here.
While AT&T’s plan allows unused data to be carried over for only one month, T-Mobile allows the rolled-over data to be stashed for up to a year.
Asked why Virgin would only allow data to rollover for one month, Mr Scribner said the company wanted to stay consistent with what it has already been offering for several years now when it comes to allowing rollover for voice and text to the next month.
“It makes sense to be consistent with that,” Mr Scribner said.
According to Mr Scribner, internal Virgin data shows that less than one in five of its customers use all their data in any given month. But many customers occasionally exceed their data limit, with about 40 per cent breaking their data cap over a six-month period.
“We looked into it and discovered that almost half of these people would have paid nothing or at least reduced excess charges if they had data rollover,” Mr Scribner said.
But at the end of the day, he said “all the modelling in the world” still wouldn’t have stopped Virgin from going down the path of enabling data rollover for customers.
“We can’t ignore the customer asking for it,” he said. “And 94 per cent of them said when we asked them about it that they think data rollover a fabulous thing to have.”
The study, conducted by Fieldwork, involved 1059 adult Australian smartphone owners.
Virgin Mobile is the fourth largest mobile phone provider in Australia. According to AC Nielson, its market share for the quarter ending December was 6.9 per cent for in terms of postpaid plans.
