Mobile Network Comparison

We hope you enjoyed reading the first half of our interview with OVIVO Founder Dariush Zand. We’ve got the second part ready for you now which will cover the tariffs currently available, the amount of adverts you can expect to watch and thoughts for the future of the mobile industry and mobile internet in general.

When do you launch and how can users get started with you?

We launched on April 16th! Visitors to www.ovivomobile.com can sign up for £5.00 and they will receive their SIM card in 2 business days direct to their home address. They will receive that £5.00 as credit in their account for any call charges made outside of their free allowance.

We have two simple tariffs: Ovivo for Smartphones – 200 Any Network Minutes, 200 Texts, 512MB, Free Ovivo to Ovivo Calls and Texts. And then, Ovivo for Tablets and Mobile Broadband – 1GB Free Mobile Internet. You receive this free allowance EACH MONTH with NO MINIMUM To-up required!

Outside of the bundle charges are the cheapest in the UK – 6p per minute (standard rate calls and mobiles), text and megabyte. If you bring your mobile number to Ovivo, you will also receive a £5.00 bonus and through our Ovivo Rewards Facebook Application, you can recommend the service to your friends and earn reward points when they sign up. These can be exchanged for free credit, but we will be looking to offer special promotions in the future.

What sort of ratio of advert-viewing-to-free-service can we expect?

At present, you will see an ad break when browsing as soon as you accumulate 2MB of Data Usage or after 15 Minutes, whichever happens first. However, we don’t serve up these adverts if (for example) you are in the middle of a transaction on a website. We try to minimise the customer intrusion. We are of course fine tuning the experience as we go, but the key point is that as time goes by, the advertising will become more and more relevant, targeted and therefore of value to our customers.

What do you think the impact of 4G and the exponential rise of smartphones is going to be on data pricing and where do you see the network in five years?

Very interesting question! As a consumer myself, I welcome 4G/LTE and the general evolution of networks. As a former Technologist, the technology behind LTE will address a lot of the challenges networks face as a result of the Smartphone explosion (capacity constraints, battery consumption as a result of handing over between 3G and 2G, rollout constraints, etc.). From a commercial perspective, the opportunities are endless with 4G allowing carriers and MVNOs to deliver much more media rich advertising and applications that add even more value to the customer experience. It will take time though for its rollout but likely we will continue to see as a result, the steady decline of data pricing from a wholesale perspective, which in turn will allow Ovivo to continue providing lots of free usage each month and monetise our service through Mobile Advertising and Value Added Applications. Looking historically, the average spend of a mobile phone user hasn’t changed much in 20 years…the speed of the network has, the capabilities of the phone and the usage has sky-rocketed. This trend will continue.

So there you are – hopefully that answered some of your questions about OVIVO. However, we really want to get together with Dariush to ask him a bit more about the network so if you have any questions of your own, please post them in the comments section so we can ask OVIVO for you.