Open Vodafone‘s website this morning and one finds two companies arguing. The first asks fifty-eight dollars a month. The second, sitting directly beside it, asks forty-five – and offers more. Both are Vodafone. Both are live. Both are today.
Four moves in a fortnight, on a price list the company spent months preparing and held, at full freight, for the length of a long weekend. The argument, it turns out, has changed character. They are no longer arguing about how to win. There is no available way to win. They are arguing about which way to lose.
Post #80 described this company as two companies in a purple coat: two strategies at war inside one building, taking turns to win the quarterly argument, the plug yanked whenever the other side prevailed. The coat has come apart. One no longer waits a quarter to watch the fight – it is on the pricing page, in colour, thirteen dollars apart.
The Four Dollars
The tell is not the thirteen dollars. It is the four.
On or about 12 July, eleven days into the new price list, Vodafone reduced its student plan from thirty-nine dollars to thirty-five. Four dollars, off the cheapest and least valuable product in the catalogue – the cohort that by definition moves for the price of a coffee.
It matters because it is about so little. A company turning over five billion dollars does not shave four dollars from a student plan eleven days after a strategic reset because it has refined its thinking. It does it because there is nothing else left to move.
And it matters because of where the crack appeared. A premium brand does not discover its pricing error among students. It discovers it among the people paying the premium.
Fourteen Days of War
The first of July is not an idle Wednesday. It is the one morning a listed telco tells the market what it believes its product is worth. What followed is best read as a scoreboard.
1 July – the premium camp wins. The half-price offer that had run since March is allowed to lapse. The front book takes a further five dollars on top. Out comes a list sitting above Optus at every tier: fifty-eight against forty-five, sixty-eight against fifty-five, seventy-eight against seventy-five – and Optus folds twenty dollars of content credit into that last one, which on any honest reading makes it fifty-five. It is a statement of conviction from a company that added net nobody to its premium base last year, whose complaints run some forty per cent adrift of its rivals, and whose network had collapsed nationally a fortnight earlier.
4 July – the fighter camp answers. Three days. An offer surfaces below the line: thirteen dollars a month off, twelve months, unannounced, uncampaigned, shown to some and withheld from others. Split-testing. Retargeting. The digital equivalent of a shopkeeper leaning across the counter and murmuring what would you say to thirteen off. The headline price stays up. It simply is not the price any more.
12 July – the fighter camp presses. The student plan drops four dollars overnight, landing precisely where Optus sits for the same (student) allowance.
15 July – the fighter camp wins the war. Two plans appear beside the old ones: eighty gigabytes for forty-five dollars, two hundred and fifty for fifty-five. Vodafone has named them the Small Promo Plan and the Medium Promo Plan, which is at least candid, because a promo plan is typically a handset instrument – wheeled out when a phone launches, when Apple wants a moment, when there is something to promote. There was no phone. It was mid-July, mid-quarter, mid-winter, nothing whatever on the calendar. The thirteen dollars murmured in the dark on the fourth had simply been handed a product name and a twelve-month runway.
And the fifty-eight dollar plan is still standing. Beside the forty-five. Neither camp has surrendered; they have simply both been given a shelf.
Post #80 set out what that looked like in late 2025: a fifty per cent offer that appeared, ran hard, then vanished; inclusions that shifted; legacy customers receiving increase notices in the same week new customers were offered discounts on the identical plan.
By this masthead’s count, four changes across eight weeks – standard pricing, half-price, and a run of unusually generous Black Friday offers. That, one now appreciates, was the truce.
Who Pays
Look at who pays for each side’s victory, because that is where the argument shows its teeth.
The stranger gets the promo plan. The loyalist gets the letter. One customer, receiving his notice this month, recorded that his plan was going up five dollars, the fourth consecutive year he had received such a notice, and observed with commendable restraint that wholesale pricing has been falling throughout. He was compensated with five gigabytes he does not use. Elsewhere a customer who renewed twelve months at two hundred and fifty dollars watched the identical prepaid product appear at one hundred and seventy-nine, for new connections only, within the fortnight.
This is not incoherence. It is the two camps operating simultaneously on the same base. The premium camp needs ARPU, so it bills the people who cannot be bothered leaving. The fighter camp needs volume, so it bribes the people who have not yet arrived. Each is being perfectly rational within its own logic, and the customer – who experiences both, sometimes in the same week, sometimes on the same page – concludes the only thing available to him, which is that the asking price is a work of fiction.
And the argument has got inside the sub-brand, where it produces something close to satire.
Felix – the company’s own fighter, built to undercut its own parent – has spent the year unable to settle on its introductory offer, running it at three months, then four, then six, and now back to three.
Watch, though, where the price movements land. When the unlimited plan went up, it went up on the front book alone – thirty-five dollars to forty for anyone arriving, while everybody already on it was grandfathered and left precisely where they were. A price rise that collects nothing from the base is a curious sort of price rise. It is really a decision not to touch the heavy users, dressed up as a decision to charge more.
Now, from 19 August 2026, the back book gets its turn – and it is the cheap plans that receive the letter. Twenty-five dollars becomes thirty. Thirty becomes thirty-five. The unlimited tier, once again, is left alone.
Read that twice. The customers who consume least and cost least to carry have been asked for more. The heaviest users – the ones straining the very capacity the company cannot spare and will not fund – have now been shielded from two consecutive price movements.
Whatever Felix is managing, it is not its margin. It is its subscriber count, and it has evidently worked out which cohort would leave loudest.
The premium camp has got inside the fighter’s own brand and started taxing the people it was built to attract.
There is no lane. There is only the argument, running now at every price point the group operates.
The Hand They Are Arguing Over
Which invites the question nobody in that building appears to have asked lately: what, precisely, are the two camps fighting for?
Six years ago the company had two businesses. One was boring and profitable – fibre, enterprise, government, wholesale, the unglamorous infrastructure that throws off durable, high-margin earnings for decades and does not require a celebrity to explain itself. The 2020 scheme booklet said in terms that having both halves was the entire point of the merger.
So look at what remains on the table, because this is the hand the argument is being conducted over.
A mobile business in third place, whose premium base has not grown in four years – 2,846,000 at the open, 2,846,000 at the close – through a doubled coverage footprint, forty million dollars of advertising, and a hundred days at half price.
A Fixed remnant that has lost more than a hundred thousand subscribers and keeps losing them, quarter after quarter, through year upon year of assurances that the losses were moderating. They were not moderating. They were merely losing at a rate somebody had decided to describe as moderating.
A regional network rented from Optus – the competitor it is supposed to be fighting – on an eleven-year term, after 755 of its own sites were switched off.
A brand whose single most durable achievement is that this masthead is named after it.
That is not a hand anybody plays to win. It is a hand you fold, or a hand you play very carefully for as long as the chips hold out.
Which is why the argument between the two camps has quietly changed character, and neither camp appears to have noticed. They are no longer arguing about how to win. There is no available way to win. They are arguing about which way to lose.
Neither Camp Can Win
And the arithmetic is not a matter of opinion. It has been run, in public, four times.
The premium camp is right: the company cannot survive on fighter margins. A business earning seven million dollars before tax on five billion of revenue does not have a discount strategy available to it. There is no floor beneath the price to retreat into.
The fighter camp is also right: the company cannot hold a premium price. This is the fourth consecutive year the back book has been lifted. It is the fourth consecutive year the postpaid line has refused to move. The base has been given four opportunities to demonstrate what it does when the price rises, and it has answered identically each time.
Both are correct. That is the trap.
So every fortnight one camp wins, and the company loses in that camp’s preferred direction. The premium camp wins and the customers leave. The fighter camp wins and the margin does. There is no third door, and there is no version of the fortnight in which nothing at all is surrendered.
This is what separates a spiral from a decline. A decline is a company getting worse. A spiral is a company whose corrections are the cause – where the instinct that feels like rescue is the mechanism of descent, where every move is a move downward, and where the only variable left is the interval between them.
Nor is the audience passive. A permanent sale teaches. Every fortnightly discount is a lesson delivered to three million customers, and the lesson is: do not pay the asking price, because it is not the price, and if you wait eleven days something better will appear. They have trained their own base to wait, and then expressed surprise that nobody pays.
Show Me the Incentive
Which raises the only interesting question left: why does nobody simply pick a side?
Post #80 could not answer it. The remuneration report can.
The chief executive collected a short-term incentive of $3,053,206 for the year – 87.64 per cent of the maximum available – from a business that cleared seven million dollars before tax. That scorecard rewards ARPU. It also rewards subscriber growth. It rewards a satisfaction measure the company marks itself, which duly printed at maximum in the year the ombudsman’s tables printed at a multi-year worst.
So the premium camp has a bonus reason to raise the price, and the fighter camp has a bonus reason to cut it, and neither is being paid to hold a position for longer than a quarter. The war is not ideological. It is funded. Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome, as Munger had it – and nobody in that building is paid to know what the company is.
Which is also why the number that would settle the argument took a sabbatical.
Churn – the single figure revealing whether an increase has stuck – vanished from the investor materials for two reporting periods before being quietly restored, as though it had never been away. A company confident its price rises are holding does not remove the holding metric at precisely the moment it is being tested.
Rearranging the Price List
Post #42 described this company as a ship listing in open water, losing stability one compartment at a time. Nothing since has improved the analogy, and July has furnished it with a detail the author did not anticipate.
The two camps are no longer arguing about the destination. The destination was settled when the profitable half was sold. What they are arguing about now is the furniture: which plan goes where, at what price, on which shelf, this fortnight.
The premium camp moves a chair to the bow. The fighter camp moves it back. Four dollars here, thirteen there, and the pricing page is refreshed, and the customers watch, and the water keeps coming in at the rate it was always going to.
Because that is the only honest description of what remains available.
The disposals are spent.
The capital expenditure is being cut, offered to the market as discipline and delivered because the alternative is worse.
The customer service has been outsourced and measured on average handling time until nothing further can be removed that will not return as complaints and churn.
Fixed Home Wireless, the higher-margin product management professes to covet, cannot be sold at all in some of the metro addresses where it would sell best.
Wholesale fills the subscriber count at rates the retail brand could not survive a quarter of – a bit of a drug, that: margin now, no relationship, and the customers who arrive for a supermarket special leave for a supermarket special.
There is no move on this board that gains anything.
There are only moves that lose less badly than the others, and the company is now selecting between them in public, on a fortnightly cycle, in front of the people it is trying to sell to.
Stem the bleeding. Patch the holes. That is the strategy. It has no third verb.
For Efficiency Reasons
Nobody is suggesting TPG cannot pay its bills.
A mature telco can travel an extraordinary distance down this road while remaining perfectly solvent, meeting its dividend, and issuing decks with arrows that point upward.
It arrives in a joint announcement, some years from now, on a Thursday. There will be a chairman’s letter about scale, and a synergies figure with a range around it, and an assurance that consumers will be the ultimate beneficiaries of a more sustainable market structure. The word will be efficiency. It will be nobody’s fault. It will be presented as the culmination of a strategy rather than the conclusion of one, and the same people who spent a decade unable to decide what the company was will explain, with feeling, that the decision has now been taken for them by the market.
The writing has been on the wall for some time. It has been on the pricing page since the first of July, where two companies are currently arguing about what they are worth, thirteen dollars apart, and neither of them is winning.
The customers, one notices, have already picked a side. They picked the exit.
📨 Right of Reply
TPG Telecom Limited, Vodafone, Felix, Optus, 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. If a figure is wrong, a date misremembered, or the price list since restored to the one published on the first of July, the author would genuinely like to know, and to say so.
Verified responses sent to vodafailed@gmail.com will be published in full and without editorial amendment, alongside the original article. This right of reply remains open indefinitely – rather longer, one notes, than most of the prices discussed above.
⚖ Disclosure, Disclaimer & Legal Notice
This article is independent commentary and analysis on a matter of public interest, drawn entirely from publicly available material: publicly published carrier pricing pages, plan inclusions and promotional terms; publicly posted discussion on consumer forums; TPG Telecom‘s ASX disclosures, annual report, remuneration report, 2020 Scheme Booklet, and reported subscriber, ARPU and guidance figures; and publicly reported competitor pricing and transactions. No confidential, privileged, or non-public information has been used in its preparation.
Pricing, plan inclusions and promotional terms change frequently and are described as observed and publicly reported at or around the dates stated; some figures are drawn from publicly posted consumer reports and are subject to the limitations of external observation. Readers should check current pricing directly with the relevant provider. Nothing here is a recommendation to switch to, or away from, any provider, and no endorsement is asserted or implied.
Characterisations of the company’s strategic position, trajectory and prospects – including references to decline, to a spiral, to a ship taking on water, to a war between internal strategies, and to any future consolidation or merger – are the author’s opinion and analytical inference, reasonably held on the basis of that public material, and are offered as commentary, metaphor and speculation about industry structure. They are expressly not statements of fact as to solvency, viability, or future performance, nor as to the intentions of any company, shareholder or director. Nothing here asserts that TPG Telecom is insolvent, unable to meet its obligations, at risk of failure, or in negotiations of any kind. No transaction is asserted to be contemplated, proposed or on foot.
References to internal strategic tension, positioning and the purpose of particular pricing instruments are analytical commentary and reasonable inference drawn from publicly observable behaviour – published pricing changes, promotional cadence and product naming, the published remuneration report, reporting and disclosure changes, published capital expenditure guidance, publicly reported transactions, and the divergence between published narratives and external data. No assertion is made about the content of any internal document, meeting or communication, and no information has been sought or obtained from any person subject to a duty of confidence.
References to remuneration are drawn from the company’s own published remuneration report and stated as disclosed. Commentary on incentive design and its likely behavioural consequences is analytical opinion, reasonably held, and is not an allegation of impropriety, bad faith or breach of duty by any director, officer or employee.
Consumer and forum comments quoted are the publicly posted opinions of their respective authors, reproduced for comment and analysis. That commentary is drawn from independent, self-selecting public posts; those who take the time to post are not a representative sample of any customer base, and nothing here should be read as suggesting the views quoted are indicative of any provider’s customers as a whole. They are individual accounts, cited as such.
All views expressed are the author’s honest opinions, formed on reasonable grounds from that public material, and are published in reliance on the protections afforded to honest opinion, fair comment, and publication in the public interest under the Defamation Act 2005 (NSW). No allegation is made, and none should be read, that TPG Telecom, Vodafone, Felix or any related entity or individual has engaged in misleading conduct or any breach of any law, regulation, code or standard. All entities and individuals retain the presumption of lawful conduct unless a competent authority determines otherwise.
This is not financial, investment, or legal advice, and nothing in it constitutes a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security. TPG Telecom, Vodafone, Felix, Optus, Telstra, Vocus, Apple and related names are trademarks of their respective owners, used here for identification, commentary and analysis only, with no affiliation or endorsement asserted or implied.
The author has an active dispute with TPG Telecom Limited (ASX: TPG), has made protected disclosures under Part 9.4AAA of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), and holds an immaterial shareholding in TPG Telecom Limited. These interests should be weighed when reading this commentary.
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
Post #82 – The Cartographer’s Apology
Post #85 – The Uninvited Guest
Post #87 – Acting On Instructions
Post #88 – Sequins and Silence
Post #89 – A Run of Unfortunate Weather