Vodafone Germany continued its “Gigabit” marketing strategy with the launch of a new multi-service offering called GigaKombi that replaces the former Vodafone Red One package.
The operator, which launched the Gigabit campaign in the second quarter of this year with a focus on very high-speed LTE services, larger inclusive data allowances and the abolition of EU roaming fees, said the GigaKombi plan would be available to subscribers from Monday at prices starting from €19.99 ($22.50) for a 12-month promotional period.
The package enables subscribers to combine fixed and mobile services at a discount, including the option to bundle Vodafone Red smartphone plans together with fixed broadband services that offer speeds of up to 400 Mbps. The Vodafone Red plans include the “LTE Max” service that promises speeds of up to 375 Mbps.
Vodafone Germany claims that this is the “fastest high-speed package on the market”. The package also includes up to five mobile SIM cards for additional users within the same household and offers Vodafone TV free of charge for a year.
Hannes Ametsreiter, CEO of Vodafone Germany, said the GigaKombi plan is the next “offensive” in the operator’s Gigabit strategy. The Gigabit campaign is set to continue throughout the year. The first elements included Giga-Speed, Giga-Daten and Giga-Travel.
The rebranding of the former Red One plan as GigaKombi generally reflects Vodafone Germany’s strategy of offering increasingly faster fixed and mobile data speeds.
The company has previously said it would offer 375 Mbps speeds in 50 cities this year and in all cities in 2017, noting that its LTE network already covered 87 per cent of German landmass with speeds of up to 225 Mbps. Speeds are expected to reach 525 Mbps by the autumn with 1 Gbps set to be offered in selected locations by the end of the year.
The Gigabit campaign also forms a core element of Vodafone Germany’s onslaught on rival Telekom Deutschland, which it has criticised for focusing on “vectoring” services that merely upgrade existing copper networks rather than deploying a fibre-to-the-premises network.
Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao has described the vectoring plan as a “re-monopolisation” of the last mile and stressed that vectoring is merely an intermediate technology.
Both Telekom and O2 Germany also offer multi-service plans under MagentaEINS and O2 Blue One respectively.
For more:
- see this Vodafone Germany release (in German)
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