Vodafone’s decision to back-peddle on its promotion of 3G is timely acceptance by the world’s biggest mobile operator that the technology and its services are not compelling enough for subscribers to pay the premium prices that mobile carriers are charging. The re-evaluation might have a domino effect throughout the industry and it is expected that other operators will follow suit and change their marketing tack. Vodafone is now to concentrate on pushing the excellence of 3G voice similar to Verizon in the U.S. This is a signal that operators are now focusing on their customer's real needs and will be competing more directly on the quality of the basic services they offer. The difficulty with this approach though is that individual subscribers have no independent way of assessing which mobile carrier actually offers the best quality. The parameters that determine “quality” vary so much between carriers and in subscriber perceptions that www.deadzones.co.uk was started as an open forum where mobile phone users can share service coverage complaints with fellow subscribers and with the operators themselves.
