This is entertaining AND irritating. Paul Brislen from Vodafone, replying to a gripe about the uselessness of Vodafone Live compared to The Internet, say the following:
“The reason customers use [Vodafone Live] in the first place is because going out onto the WWW without such protection can be fruitless and expensive. The front page of Stuff alone would cost a fortune to open…”
Fantastic. That’s a Vodafone NZ rep saying that VFLive is better than the internet because accessing the internet will cost you insanely high per-meg data charges. Data charges set by … Vodafone NZ.
This is pretty much exactly like being tried for murdering your parents and asking the judge for clemency because you are an orphan.
I presume VFLive servers are located in a data center in NZ. So are the Stuff.co.nz servers. In order to get to stuff.co.nz at speed, Vodafone might have to run some peering links up to APE and/or WIX, but that’d probably cost no more than a few thousand a month for some GigE or 10gigE links, spread across their entire userbase. Accessing VFLive is free. Accessing stuff.co.nz costs 50c/megabyte. I’d like to see someone from Vodafone attempt to explain why.