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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Wholesale Customers: Correct Treatment?

Vodafone UK counts its’ 341k BT MVNO Customers (214k Business & 127k Consumer – Mar ‘06) as a single customer. I'm not sure of the treatment of the student MVNO on the Voda network.

O2 UK counts its’ 1m+ Joint Venture Customers with Tesco as zero. Although it does count of part of its’ base the wholesale customers in a similar venture in Germany with Tchibo – hardly consistent treatment.

T-Mobile UK counts its’ 4.346m active Virgin Wholesale Customers (as at Dec-05) as part of its’ base , although it does not comment on the 362k (CPW Mar-06) Fresh customers. Furthermore, OFCOM in its’ quarterly statistics also carries the caveat that T-Mobile uses a different basis for defining active customers and therefore its’ base is overstated. EasyMobile proably does not represent even a rounding error, so I think we can safetly ignore them.

Orange UK is easier because it doesn’t have any MVNO customers.

With so many MVNO customers around and the different method of calculating the base, it is hardly surprising that comparing operators’ performance is extremely difficult. Does anyone else this is a deliberate strategy by the MNOs?