Is there a sliding scale for telephone service prices, which will rise with inflation? Spain breaks the ice with a revolution that could soon affect all of Europe, including Italy.
In recent days Vodafone España has decided to index their telephone rates to inflation. A move established to contain the impacts of the energy crisis and the high cost of living on the company's accounts, but also to put an end to the (downward) price war that is bringing many big names in the sector to their knees".
How will the telephone escalator work? Like that of pensions
From 2023, Spanish Vodafone will automatically update its basic tariffs as the market evolvesconsumer price index. The formula applied will be similar to the one used for the new pension calculation, with the official CPI calculated from October of the previous year (2021) to September of the current year (2022).
According to the calculations of El Pais, with the indexation of tariffs to the consumer price index, if inflation were around 10% in 2022, the increase for an average fiber and mobile package of 80 euros would be included between 6 and 7 euros.
The transition to the new tariff regime will be made in the first quarter of the 2023 and will concern all Vodafone customers, except for those "financially vulnerable" and for customers of Lowi, the low-cost brand of Vodafone.
The initiative is part of the global strategy of the British group to counter the impact of inflation on costs. The company already applies this measure in the UK and may soon extend it to other markets.
Will the telephone escalator also arrive in Italy?
The problem that the Spanish move has raised is whether Vodafone Espana's experience can also be exported to Italy or not. For the moment it is not known what Vodafone Italia intends to do but something is moving among the other managers and even the Stock Exchange has noticed it. In recent months, the new CEO of The team, Pietro Labriola had in fact raised the issue of indexation to deal with the cost of living, support the revenues of telephone companies and enable them to deal with the huge investments that the digital transition requires, without further aggravating debt. It has not escaped financial analysts that just in the days in which the novelty of the mobile telephone scale appeared in Spain, Tim's share on Piazza Affari soared. On the other hand, those who exclude indexing of telephone tariffs in Italy are Iliad. But the game has just begun and Mediobanca Securities he immediately underlined that now "it will be interesting to see how the main competitors behave": in Spain as in Italy
