Vodafone CEO praises tiered mobile data pricing

The abandonment of unlimited mobile data offers has benefited both operators and consumers, Vodafone chief Vittorio Colao has claimed.

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday, Colao said that "tiered data pricing is good because it gives customers choice and control". Over the last year, operators including Vodafone have dropped their claims of unlimited data use, generally dropping their limits to around 500MB per month for smartphone users — however, most operators will provide higher caps for a premium.

Referring to the growing tablet market, Colao noted that tiered pricing "gives [operators] the opportunity to upsell when all these nice devices create demand".

However, Colao also said his network was easily ready for more data use growth. Whereas operators tend to cite capacity constraints as a reason for their lowered data caps, Vodafone's network has seen a stable average utilisation of around 35 percent, and its number of sites experiencing peak usage has also remained stable at seven percent.

"Our infrastructures are capable of supporting the great growth ahead of us," Colao said, adding that "this explosion of data has not come with an explosion of our network, which is good".

One year ago, Colao used his platform in Barcelona to call for tiered bandwidth pricing as well, although this phenomenon is yet to appear in the mobile world.