No Return to Cheap Home Broadband for Vodafone UK

Mobile operator Vodafone has told this week’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona (Spain) that it will not return to offering a domestic focused fixed line home broadband product in the United Kingdom, although they will expand upon their broadband services for business clients.

Regular readers may recall that the operator scrapped its “unlimited” fixed line At Home broadband service at the end of 2011 because, they claimed, “the UK is not a strategic focus at the present time” (here). In reality Vodafone had struggled to keep up with a rapidly evolving market and instead chose to shift their remaining customers on to PlusNet.

Vodafone then went on to signal a greater focus towards business provision with their £1bn purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide in April 2012 (here) and that now looks set to be its strategy for the foreseeable future.

Vittorio Colao, Vodafones CEO, told MWC 2013 (Mobile Today):

“For the time being the level of competition on pricing in the UK is so high that each individual segment already has pretty low tariffs.”

No surprise. Most of the country’s mobile operators, at least those that have attempted to run a home broadband service, seem to struggle with the concept. EE (Orange UK) and most recently O2 have both found it difficult to attract and retain customers, while Three UK steered well clear.