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Two years ago when 5G was getting ready (well, almost) to launch, people were discussing what kind of “premium” price it would (could) have. I should say I was very skeptical on the possibility to charge a premium price on it, at least in Europe and for sure in Italy. It turned out I was right.
Everywhere in Europe you get 5G at the same price of 4G.
Now I stumbled onto an offer by Vodafone (Italy) promising unlimited data on 5G as long as you are also subscribing to their fixed (fibre) network at a very low price (9.99€ per month including an all you can eat voice and messaging).
Well, no surprise with this, it is just along the slippery slope of price cuts to face competition. What really surprised me was reading the fine print! There you discover (I took a screenshot and used it as the image opening this post) is that you get “unlimited” data on 5G but only 10 GB on 4G! (they call it 4.5 but that is just marketing…).
At first glance it just sound crazy! You get unlimited data on the much more performant 5G network and only a meagre 10 GB on 4G. You would have expected the reverse…
However, this is telling us a lot on 5G in Italy:
- there is very little traffic on 5G because: probably because there are few 5G phones around. Possibly, if you are like myself, people stick to 4G to avoid draining the battery (when you are on 5G you are also on 4G to manage voice traffic, hence one of the reason your smartphone gets hot and its battery depletes quickly). Vodafone 5G network is probably experiencing very little traffic…
- the 5G coverage is still very limited, so most of the time you have to use 4G
- increasing further the capacity of the 4G network might not be appealing since 5G can deliver more bandwidth per € ($), so for an operator it could make sense to shift traffic to 5G to offload the 4G network.
All in all, the hope of charging a premium price on 5G seems definitely dead, at least in Italy!
