Vodafone on the edge: Loses 216K more customers

Last week Vodafone’s parent company in the UK released their first quarterly figures for 2013. The results revealed an alarming amount of users are leaving the service due to frustrations with the telecommunications company. An amount of roughly 216,000 have left the service in the Q1 2013 seeing an increase in the rate of customers leaving the service when compared to last year.

In 2012 a total amount of 443,000 left the service due to frustrations with Vodafone. The largest issue for users is the reception quality of the network. Vodafone does deliver the cheapest prices out of the 3 big mobile carries in Australia (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone) but the quality of it’s network is far below competitors. With Optus and Telstra rolling out their 4G network on a large scale across Australia, Vodafone’s network is still awaiting a June release that will see a limited release in only major cities.

Recent bids to get customers back hasn’t been working out well for Vodafone.

Even with a release coming up it’s not a sure bet that Vodafone’s new network will deliver a reliable service from the get go. It took Vodafone a number of years for them to get their 3G network up to a working level.  A long history of customer complaints as well as unsatisfactory network coverage has resulted in a country-wide stigma against the company. Recent bids to get customers back on board have all but failed, the recent figures reveal.

Regardless of the substantial losses though, Vodafone still retains a big user base of 6.2 Million customers. Currently the company (one of Australia’s biggest mobile phone carriers) is losing these customers at an increased rate in contrast to last year. This year’s release of the 4G network and how well it fares may be deciding factor in the fate of the Vodafone’s surviving customers.