Aldi Mobile has made a significant change to their offerings. They previously had an offer of $35 for “unlimited” calls and 2.5G of data in a month for which they had to publicly apologise for misleading customers as 2500 minutes of calls a month (83 minutes per day) is no-where near unlimited [1]. They also had an offer of $15 for 2G of data.
In an email about this Aldi said “Many of our customers are using a lot less than what is included in our current $35 plan. So we will soon be introducing new Value Packs with more flexible options; meaning you only pay for what you really need and they start from just $10.“. That is grossly misleading, if they offered new plans in addition to the old ones and allowed customers to choose the plan that is the best match then it would be useful to some customers. But removing the supposedly “unlimited” plan and the $15 for 2G of data option is removing affordable options for people who want to use their phones for lots of calls or very few calls but moderate amounts of data use.
New Plans
The base rate for calls on Aldi pre-paid is $0.12 per minute and $0.12 per SMS, consider every mention of “minute” in this section to be “minute or SMS”. The Aldi Newplans page [2] starts with a $10 per month plan which offers 100 minutes of calls which would be $12 at the previous rate of $0.12 per minute. That is OK value when compared to just using the pre-paid calls if you consistently use more than 83 minutes of calls per month. However if you don’t use 84 minutes of calls (EG you don’t speak much on the phone and use Google Hangouts instead of SMS) then it’s not good value. Also the advertised data use is $5 per 100MB, which is way below what is needed for a typical user with an Android phone. My mother in law was barely able to stick within a limit of 300MB/month when that was her limit, but while using the Aldo 2G/month bolt-on she’s increased her data usage.
The smallest of the new plans costs $20 per month, it provides 300 minutes of calls and includes 300MB of data. For an extra $7 you can get another 300MB of data. For my mother in law it seems that the cheapest option on the new plans would be $27 per month, that would cover the 60 minutes of calls she might make and the 450MB of data she’s probably using. That’s significantly more expensive than her previous cost of $15 for 2G of data and $7.20 for calls and has the additional difficulty that I would have to be more involved in helping her avoid excessive data use.
The 2G data bolt-on was really good for some of my relatives, when they use that and configure their phones not to update software over 3G they never had to ask me about any problems related to excess data use. So my mother in law is facing an extra $5 per month (or maybe more depending on data use) and more time spent calling me for tech support.
The data bolt on that Aldi is going to offer in future is $30 for 3G of data to replace the previous offer of $15 for 2G of data. The cost will be unchanged for anyone who uses between 2G and 3G a month, for everyone who uses less than 2G or more than 3G the data bolt-on will cost more. There is simply no possibility for any Aldi data-only customer to save on data use. The only way someone who uses a moderate amount of data could save money is if they use more than 160 minutes of calls and less than 1G of data.
Disclaimer
My analysis above is based on interpreting the Aldi web site. As with most telcos they aren’t trying to make things easy in this regard, it seems that the consensus of opinion among telcos is to use complex pricing to make it difficult to compare and reduce competitive pressure. I blame any inaccuracies in my analysis on the Aldi web site.
Why Aldi Shouldn’t Mislead Customers
Aldi isn’t primarily a mobile phone company, their main business is running a supermarket. The trust of customers is important to them, raising prices when competition goes away is one thing, but misleading customers about it is another. If Aldi were to honestly say “now that Kogan Mobile no longer exists there is nothing forcing us to have low prices” then I’d have a lot more respect for their company and be more inclined to shop at their supermarket.
It’s a sad indictment of our society that I need to include a “why lying is wrong” section in such a blog post.