Virgin Boasts Free Landline to Mobile Phone Calls

Posted 02/02/2010 at 1:12pm | by Bart Salisbury

0

Comments

Print

In the world of the phone user a phone call is a phone call, regardless of where it originates or where it terminates. Landline to landline or landline to mobile are one in the same. But not for mobile phone providers. For them mobile to mobile is okay, but landline to mobile is another matter. Virgin has announced an exception to this distinction, and will treat landline to mobile calls the same as mobile to mobile calls. But there are caveats.

First, this offer is only for residents of the United Kingdom. (That revolution business back in 1776 looks pretty foolish now, doesn’t it?) And you have to be a Virgin Phone and Virgin Mobile customer, because only calls from Virgin landlines (“home phones”) to Virgin mobiles are included. (Also, the language of Virgin’s announcement suggests that only landline to mobile calls are without charge--not the reverse.)

What’s Virgin up to? Drew Cullen at Reghardware.com says Virgin is dumping its estimate £1.6 billion ($2.6 billion) a year in landline to mobile revenues in the hopes of signing up more customers to its “quadplay” service bundle. “The company may lose a little in individual elements of the bundle but it makes much more money in the long run: people who choose all four services are very profitable and less susceptible, we suspect, to “churning” than single-service rates tarts," writes Cullen.

Virigin’s new service will go into effect April 1st.

Image Credit: Virgin Media