Vodafone, Spark promise free mobile data if your landline goes down

Vodafone — which recently had the dubious distinction of being named New Zealand's second-most complained about company — launched an "always connected" broadband promise this morning. It sounds really useful. It'll be interesting to see if rivals follow suit [update: Spark has followed suit with a free 20GB mobile data bundle if a landline goes down. Spark says it has been trialling the service for several months.]

The guts of it is that if your Vodafone landline broadband connection goes down, the company will give you "as much free mobile data as your household needs" until the connection is restored. The same goes if you're moving house and a new landline isn't enabled in time.

Vodafone won't put a number on the free mobile data, but NBR understands it's 100GB.

The free top-up mobile data can be spread across four pre-pay or contract mobiles, and shared around a house a smartphone's hotspot function.

4G mobile data is good enough for HD streaming video in most areas. The only problem is that mobile data caps are only a fraction of what you typically get with a landline, so you could easily bust your limit by streaming a single movie. The "always connected" pledge take care of that.

The offer only applies to residential customers.

A Vodafone press release was fuzzy on whether this is about unlimited mobile data.

When I asked for clarification, I was told "We will be applying the data pack in seven-day bundles. If something causes the broadband connection to be down for more than seven days, we will apply another bundle. There will be more than enough data in each seven-day bundle for a full household to function normally no matter what plan the household is on."

Vodafone consumer director Matt Williams said most faults relate to older copper lines, with UFB fibre only drawing a small number of faults. He says most faults are fixed with three days.

Mr Williams resists giving Chorus the bash over faults — and in many cases, it will be the dominant network operator that's to blame for a fault, or any delay in repairs. He probably would have been wasting his breath.

Despite UFB delays and botched installations being behind a huge surge in complaints to the Telco Dispute Resolution service over the past year, Chorus was well down the ComCom's most-complained about list, at number 17. For better or worse, retail ISPs have to wear customers' fury most of the time.

The ComCom is due to rule on the Vodafone-Sky TV merger on November 11.