Vodafone “won” 135,000 Moose and Swoop customers – though “won” flatters it, since their provider simply switched networks and nobody asked them. They don’t even count until each swaps a SIM, which some are refusing to do, the sharp deals that made Moose worth having have already vanished, and a good share look set to port straight back to Optus. Growth by chequebook, written in disappearing ink.
There are two ways for a telco to add a customer. It can persuade one – with a better network, a sharper price, a product worth switching for. Or it can simply buy the company the customer already belongs to, and inherit them by post, along with a new SIM card and a faintly worded apology.
Vodafone has been doing rather more of the second lately. It is the tell of a business that has run out of the first.
The latest delivery arrived this month, when Moose Mobile and its parent Swoop announced their customers – some 135,000 of them – would be migrated off the Optus network and onto Vodafone’s. New customers from day one; existing ones shifted “in the coming weeks,” each requiring a fresh SIM to avoid, in the company’s words, “any interruption to their service.” A phrase that does a certain amount of work, given the interruption was the entire point of the exercise.
The Customers Who Were Not Asked
The striking thing about acquiring customers wholesale is that nobody thinks to tell the customers.
The Moose and Swoop faithful – many of them, by their own accounts, loyal for years – discovered they were changing networks not through an email, not through a courtesy notification, but by noticing the website had gone dark over a weekend and reading about it afterwards on a comparison site. “It’s 2026 not 1996,” observed one, with the weariness of a man who had expected at least a heads-up before being relocated to a network he had spent years specifically not choosing. Another wondered aloud whether Moose “were just hoping no one would notice.”
They noticed. They tend to.
What they noticed, on inspection, was not encouraging. The entry-level plan that had carried 5G on the Optus network now reads 4G. The uncapped top-tier speeds were gone, replaced by a 150Mbps cap across every plan. The promotional discounts that had made Moose competitive for years – gone, and in EOFY month, no less, the one month of the year a telco is supposed to be discounting harder. One customer summed up the value proposition with the brutal economy of the genuinely unimpressed: a rival “has 25GB for $25 plus a current promo… Paying nearly the same for Vodafail for an extra 5GB? Just no.”
The migration, in other words, asked long-standing customers to accept slower speeds, a worse entry plan, and fewer discounts, in exchange for a network many of them had actively avoided – and to do so by activating a SIM card that arrived unbidden in the mail. It is a curious way to welcome 135,000 people. It is an even curiouser way to keep them.
The Coverage That Is The Same, Except Where It Isn’t
Vodafone’s standard reassurance, deployed here as everywhere, is that thanks to its network-sharing deal with Optus, the coverage is now effectively identical – roam onto Optus where Vodafone is thin, and all is well.
As one Tasmanian customer explained, with more precision than Vodafone’s marketing has ever managed, the sharing arrangement does not cover every Optus site. On the urban fringe of Hobart sit Optus towers that are not part of the deal – towers Moose customers can currently use, sitting “in the shadow” of a large Vodafone umbrella site that is technically present but “basically unusable due to congestion or being inside.” He will lose the working tower and inherit the congested one. “A backward step,” he called it, before announcing he would port away after years of loyalty. He also noted, drily, that Moose’s Facebook ads still spruiked “powered by Optus” – advertising the very network its customers were being moved off.
Seven Thousand
Now, why would a telco that cannot grow its premium postpaid base – flat, as the Investor Day confirmed, despite a hundred days of half-price plans – go to the trouble of importing 135,000 discount MVNO customers it then declines to discount for?
Because the headline subscriber number needs feeding, and these customers are feed.
The industry term, for those keeping score, is SIO filler – services in operation acquired not to build a business but to bulk out a tally. Vodafone has form. The LycaMobile customer base, transitioned in 2024, supplied better than 95% of TPG‘s wholesale subscribers in one transaction – growth by chequebook rather than by merit. Moose and Swoop are the same play, run again.
It isn’t uncommon for carriers to acquire brands for the sole purpose of bumping up the customer base or acquiring a footprint – Vodafone’s own New Zealand arm worked through a string of ISPs in much the same fashion. The playbook is well established, and it is not, in itself, sinister. It is simply what a company does when organic growth has stopped arriving on its own.
The catch is that it is an expensive way to acquire customers — unless the brands being acquired are distressed, in which case they come cheap, because a distressed seller is in no position to hold out for a good price. Which rather invites a look at the sellers.
Which invites the obvious question about the seller. Swoop has been running at a loss. The promos that made Moose attractive have vanished. And a wholesale customer is, by construction, the thinnest kind of customer there is – slim revenue per service, no brand loyalty to Vodafone whatsoever, and an established willingness to chase the next cheap SIM the moment this one disappoints. Which, on the evidence of the forums, is already happening: the loyal ones are porting to Optus MVNOs and Telstra resellers on their way out the door, taking the inflated headline number with them almost as fast as it arrived.
So Vodafone has inherited 135,000 customers who never asked to move, degraded their plans, removed their discounts, and stands to watch a good share of them leave for the network they were just dragged off. As acquisitions go, it has the structural integrity of a bucket with a documented hole.
Vodafone has form, and the form is instructive. To understand the Moose acquisition you have to understand the state of the thing it is being added to. As recently as its Ausust 2024 ASX filing, TPG’s off-net wholesale base – the MVNO customers riding its network under other brands – stood at approximately 7,000, as of 2H23. Seven thousand.
Source: TPG Telecom (ASX: TPG) filing to the ASX on 30 August 2024.
For a company of TPG‘s size, in a market where Optus and Telstra count their wholesale subscribers in the hundreds of thousands or millions, this is not a rounding error so much as a punchline. It is the wholesale footprint of a regional ISP, attached to the third-largest carrier in the country.
So when Vodafone absorbed the Lyca Mobile base late last year – roughly ~99,000 services in a single transaction – it did not so much grow its wholesale channel as invent one. A base that had been languishing in the low thousands was, overnight, multiplied many times over by a single acquisition. Not won, in the sense of customers weighing their options and choosing the product. Acquired, in the sense of a block changing hands and the headline ticking up accordingly.
Moose and Swoop are the same manoeuvre run again, two years later: another label, another six-figure slab of subscribers, another lift to a wholesale tally that, until very recently, barely existed. Two acquisitions in quick succession, each delivering by the chequebook what the business has conspicuously stopped delivering by persuasion. A pattern emerges, and it is not the pattern of a company winning customers. It is the pattern of a company shopping for them.
The Margin of Victory
There is a question doing the rounds among people who watch the wholesale channel closely, and it is worth airing carefully, because the answer is not on the public record and this masthead will not pretend otherwise.
The shape of it is this. Optus has long been a notably aggressive competitor for wholesale customers – the kind of incumbent that holds onto its MVNO partners by pricing keenly. So when a string of those partners migrates to Vodafone instead, the interesting question is not that they moved, but what it took to move them. One does not generally prise a label away from a keen incumbent by matching the price.
Which raises a fair question, and it is put no higher than a question: whether these bases are being won on the strength of the proposition, or on the sharpness of the price – and, if the latter, what that does to the economics of a subscriber the headline is counting as growth. A low-ARPU customer won on price flatters the SIO count and does considerably less for the lines beneath it. With the premium postpaid base going backwards and the growth arriving by acquired label, the question rather asks itself: is this a company adding customers that pay their way, or a company manufacturing the appearance of growth at the top of the funnel while the lines that actually matter quietly decline?
The forums have noticed the shape of it too — more than one customer has worked out that for the prices now on offer, they would do as well or better on a cheaper Optus reseller and keep the network they already had. None of which is proof of anything. But it is the kind of question a careful reader files away, to be answered – or conspicuously not answered – when the wholesale economics surface in late August.
The Customers Who Haven’t Actually Arrived
There is a wrinkle in buying customers wholesale, and it is worth dwelling on, because it sits underneath the headline number like a trapdoor.
A migrated customer does not become a Vodafone customer the moment the deal is announced. They become one only when they initiate the SIM swap, as the company is directing and encouraging them to do – and not before. Until that small physical act, they remain, in every sense that matters to the network, an Optus customer who happens to be receiving stern letters from Moose.
And people, being people, do not all perform that act at once, in tidy succession, on the company’s preferred timetable. Some do it immediately. Many put the envelope on the kitchen bench and forget it. And some – particularly those who can see exactly what they are being asked to swap to – decline to do it at all for as long as they possibly can.
Social media and forums are already full of the latter. Customer after customer, weighing the migration, has reached the same conclusion out loud: wait. “I’d wait for further coms from Moose/Swoop and re-assess.” “I might stay with Moose, I will wait for the correspondence.” One, with the air of a man who has read the room, advised the others how to do it: don’t activate the new SIM, and you sit on the old network until someone makes you move – noting that under iiNet and other MVNOs, customers who simply never did the SIM swap stayed on the original network for years.
There was, he observed, no cut-off date. The same will be tested here. A migration without a hard deadline is a migration that proceeds at the customer’s pace, not the acquirer’s – and a meaningful share of these 135,000 will hold the line on the Optus network for as long as the SIM in their phone keeps working.
Which makes the headline number a promissory note rather than a balance. Vodafone may report the win, but a won customer and a paying one are not the same thing: the wholesale revenue only becomes material once the customer actually transfers, and until they do, that income keeps flowing to Optus, not Vodafone. Every holdout is a subscriber on Vodafone‘s announcement slide and a dollar on Optus‘s wholesale ledger. The win does not tick over until each customer chooses to let it – and the customers, on the evidence, are in no hurry to oblige a brand they are conspicuously unenthusiastic about joining. It is less an acquisition than a drip feed, and the tap is in the customer’s hand.
And here is the part that ought to trouble anyone modelling the economics. Moose was, for years, one of the most aggressively competitive value brands in the market – a reliable source of genuinely sharp deals, the sort of plans that built the very customer base now being transferred. Since the move to Vodafone, those deals have quietly disappeared. The discounts that made Moose worth choosing are gone, in the middle of EOFY no less, the one month a value brand is supposed to be sharpening the pencil rather than pocketing it.
So the proposition now reads: switch to a network you didn’t pick, on plans that cost more than the ones that attracted you, with the speeds capped and the 5G stripped from the entry tier – and do it promptly, please. It is a difficult thing to sell. It is an even more difficult thing to sell to people who were drawn in precisely by the cheapness that has now evaporated. One struggles to think of a less persuasive moment to remove the discounts than the exact moment you are asking customers to forgive a great deal else.
The Number That Needs The Help
It is worth being clear about why any of this is happening, because it is not a coincidence of timing.
This is the same fortnight in which Vodafone’s network fell over nationally, in which its parent’s share price dropped about 8% on the maths behind a $2.1 billion spectrum bill, and in which the company’s own half-year detail showed Vodafone postpaid flat and prepaid going backwards while the digital brands – the cheap ones, the half-ARPU ones – did the only growing. A company in that position has two options. It can fix the product. Or it can keep buying customers by the brand-load and hope the headline subscriber line holds together until the next set of results.
It has chosen the chequebook. It usually does.
And the chequebook has a date with the ASX in late August, when the headline number – Lyca, Moose, Swoop and all – meets the churn it is busily generating, and someone has to explain how a business that keeps acquiring customers keeps failing to grow.
Inherited is not the same as earned. The market knows it. And the customer with the unswapped SIM in a drawer knows it best of all.
📩 Right of Reply
TPG Telecom Limited, Vodafone, Swoop Holdings, Moose Mobile, and any individual or entity who considers themselves referenced in this article are warmly invited to correct, clarify, or add context to anything set out above – including, should they wish, the wholesale economics this article has been careful only to ask about rather than assert. If a figure is wrong, an inference unfair, or the migration proceeding more briskly than the forums suggest, the author would genuinely like to know, and to say so.
Verified responses can be sent to vodafailed@gmail.com and will be published in full, without editorial amendment, alongside the original article. This right of reply remains open indefinitely – rather longer, one suspects, than some Moose customers intend to keep that new SIM in the drawer.
⚖️ Disclosure, Disclaimer & Legal Notice
This article is independent commentary and analysis based on publicly available information, including WhistleOut and Finder reporting, TPG Telecom‘s ASX disclosures and filings, publicly available coverage-mapping tools, and publicly posted forum discussion.
All views expressed are the author’s honest opinions, formed on reasonable grounds, and constitute fair comment on matters of public interest. This is not financial, investment, or legal advice, and nothing in it constitutes a recommendation regarding any security or telecommunications service; readers should seek their own independent professional advice before making any decision.
Subscriber and wholesale figures referred to (including the approximately 135,000 Moose Mobile and Swoop services, the approximately 99,000 services associated with the Lyca Mobile base, and the approximately 7,000 off-net wholesale figure) are drawn from public reporting and company filings and are subject to the limitations of external estimation; where a figure cannot be verified against a primary source it should be treated as an estimate rather than a statement of fact.
References to Optus‘s wholesale competitiveness, and to Vodafone‘s wholesale pricing, margins, or pricing conduct, are expressly unverified market commentary and the author’s opinion only; no confidential pricing information is known, asserted, or relied upon, and no party’s commercial terms are represented as fact.
Statements regarding the timing of customer transfers, SIM activation, and the destination of wholesale revenue describe the author’s understanding of how such migrations generally operate and are commentary, not a representation of any party’s internal arrangements.
Consumer and forum comments referred to are drawn from publicly posted sources and reflect the opinions of their respective authors. References to coverage, network sharing, and carve-out areas are based on publicly available information and individual user accounts. No assertion of any breach of any law, regulation, or standard is made.
TPG Telecom, Vodafone, and related names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners and are used in this article for identification, commentary, and analysis only. Their use does not imply any affiliation with, sponsorship by, or endorsement from those entities, and no such association is asserted or implied.
The author has an active dispute with TPG Telecom Limited (ASX: TPG) and has made protected disclosures under Part 9.4AAA of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). The author holds an immaterial shareholding in TPG Telecom Limited. These interests should be considered when evaluating the commentary presented. All entities and individuals retain the presumption of lawful conduct unless determined otherwise by a court, tribunal, or regulator of competent jurisdiction.
Previous posts in this series:
Post #65 – When The Music Stops
Post #66 – The $2B Problem TPG Can’t Afford
Post #67 – The Bonus Year: Thin Earnings, Thick Optics
Post #68 – Buying the Narrative
Post #69 – The Smart Money Just Left the Building
Post #70 – Who’s Watching the Watchers?
Post #71 – Nine Lives: The Ad Agencies Vodafone Burned Through on the Way to Zero Growth
Post #72 – Marked Safe from the Whistleblower Policy
Post #73 – The Story Nobody Will Publish
Post #75 – The Gift That Keeps Giving
Post #76 – The Seat Nobody Wants
Post #77 – Houdini Never Filed a Form 605
Post #78 – Fifteen Years and a Footnote
Post #80 – Two Companies in a Purple Coat
Post #81 – Transformational: A $7 Million Result With a $1.6 Billion Costume