Poland: Carrefour Mova - 1st "supermarket MVNO" :-)
 

The 5th MVNO is about to launch in Poland (probably on 9th Apr). It's the first "supermarket" MVNO brand in Poland (prepaid only). It will run on Plus network. According to rumours, basic rates will be 0.49 PLN/min national calls (of course 1/1 debiting no setup fee), 0.20 PLN national SMS. The starter will cost 9.99 PLN with 20 minutes credit. SIMs and top-ups will be available only in about 360 Carrefour supermarkets countrywide. Extra minutes to Mova and landlines will be available for participants of "Rodziynka", the Carrefour Poland loyalty program. 1 PLN is about 0.29 EUR now.

http://www.carrefourmova.pl/ - as of today, it's a teaser only - the slogan says: "Get ready for advantageous connections!".

About the name of the brand. It's sounds a little bit like Spanish Carrefour Movil, but I think it's an accidental similarity. "Mova" seems to me as misspelled "mowa" which is Polish for speech, talking, oration, language, dialect (depending on the context). There's no "parallel" Champion brand like in Greece since about a year ago all the Champion supermarkets here were rebranded to Carrefour Express. And the "1 Mobile" name like in Belgium/Italy would be rather weird in Polish :-).

why, would it be weird in Polish? Some bad word? :D

Oh, no! Really "bad name brand" here is e.g. Osram which means moreless "I will shit (on something/somebody)" :-P.

The problem is rather semantical. "Mobil" or "mobile" are not "valid" Polish words and they don't "match" well with "true" Polish words. Here I assume that "1" in "1 Mobile" would be pronounced in Polish and then "1" would translate to either "first" or "one". Both versions sound pretty strange and it's not clear what they really mean :-).

http://www.carrefourmova.pl/pliki/Ce...gCPTelecom.pdf - there's pricelist od Carrefour Mova.
The funniest thing is that this offert haven't GPRS and MMS services...

Well, iPlus simdata doesn't have roaming and voicemail and Sami Swoi has horrible rates for GPRS and SMS but they sell much better than all these niche MVNO SIMs :-).

The problem with Mova is that the national rates 0.49 PLN/min and 0.20 PLN/SMS aren't any unusual, especially when consider that cheaper on-net and landline calls are available only via converting loyalty points and (until 7.07) bonus on regular Carrefour purchases. Moreover, as usual with Polish mobile tariffs, international calls are horribly expensive and international SMS break the common 0.61 PLN level - it's 0.65 PLN here :-(. I'm really surprised why mobile operators don't care about the fact that millions of Poles live abroad and they leave the market of international calls to calling cards, 0708 callthroughs services and VoIP....

The only rate Mova is the best on the Polish mobile market is... the rate for satellite phones - 8 PLN/min to Australia Mobile SAT, Global Region 882 MCP and Thuraya. Oh, I already see thousands of typical Carrefour cutomers calling to satphones :-P. That is really funny to me.

BTW, the first price list published by telix.pl (http://www.telix.pl/images/taryfy/mova_cennik_uslug.pdf) contains the roaming rates over the eurotariff limits (2.50 out/1.50 in vs max rates for Poland 2.24 out/1.10 in) ;-)

Yep, Mova's nothing special, though the free minutes here and there for shopping at Carrefour might make me buy a SIM to burn them off (Otwock, where I am much of the time, has a Carrefour Express, a de facto monopoly supermarket). I notice that it seems to be the first Plus-related offer to give cumulative card validity, up to 12 months (but at the same stingy rate of 3 months/50 PLN that pretty much all prepaids offer in Poland). As it is, to enjoy your free minutes, you still have to buy airtime regularly just to keep the SIM active, and it's nothing special.

A low-priced international SIM, or one with generous expiration, is something that could make a big difference on the Polish market. But, for example, Play had the chance to do something bold (as a new player, pardon the pun), but it had comparable rates, rapid expiration, and rotten international rates as everyone else. Now it's Carrefour's turn to be undistinguished. Hmmph.

Slightly OT, but how does one make cheap international calls in Poland from a landline?

Yes, it's nothing special, but not very bad either. However, I really wonder why Mova doesn't offer any data services - not even MMS! The only "modern" service is videocalling in the Plus 3G coverage...

By "international" you mean the SIM with low international rates? Yes, you're right - the rates are horrible now, but something is going to change (very slowly). Since last year Heyah has a special 0.68 PLN/min rate to Ukraine (and the Ukrainian version of the website). A week ago Simplus introduced 3 "cheap" numbers (EU w/o Gibraltar and French overseas territories + Belarus, Croatia, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine). It costs extra 5 PLN/30 days/number but the rate is 1 PLN/min with 1/1 no-setup-fee debiting - really new for international calls from Polish mobiles. Today I read about plans for a first "ethnic" (precisely Ukrainian & Vietnamese) MVNO...

As to expiration, you probably mean expiration for outgoing calls. Eg. 1 year for incoming with working free VM and some 0800 in Orange isn't that bad...

Hehe, but Play is not a MVNO! That's why must suck money whereever possible to build its real network :-D and pay for national roaming to Plus in the same time. For the same reason, they are allowed to have MTR at 0.65 PLN/min whereas "the Big Three" has 0.40 PLN/min (and will drop in May to some 0.33 PLN/min).

One doesn't make at all:-P.

But seriously - what do you mean by "landline": TP SA, other operators like Dialog, Netia, MNI etc., payphones? And what are highest rates in zlotys, both for foreign landlines and mobiles, which you would accept as "cheap"?

I mean a normal, non-mobile phone. Since cheap international calls to most destinations are not possible from a mobile phone, what's the best method from a landline? TPSA charges 1.49 PLN to call most of Europe and the USA. Tele2 charges 66 grosz -- obviously an improvement, but not cheap.

By comparison, in Germany (which 10 years ago had just about the highest rates in the civilized world), you can choose a provider on a call-by-call basis from a standard Deutsche Telekom landline, and calls to these destinations are usually 0.8-2 cents/min; websites such as billiger-telefonieren.de allow you to see current rates. However, there is no Polish equivalent, and even the masses of phone cards available at the post office do not display their rates (and there's no comparison website that I know of).

One thing about Mova: you can only add 30 free minutes per month that you get from shopping at Carrefour, and the code for the free minutes expires after two weeks, so you can't save your shopping receipts until the next month. (Initial SIM validity is only 30 days anyway.) The free minutes are only good for landlines and other Mova numbers; add it all up and for 10 zloty starter kit you get 20 normal minutes included, plus it's easy to add 30 minutes extra (look around when you're at Carrefour, you're bound to find 30 minutes worth of receipts lying on the ground or in shopping carts, at check-out counters, etc.), making calls work out to around 20 grosz per minute, provided you only place 50 minutes worth. If calling landlines is such a big deal, Sami Swoi is probably a more hassle-free choice.

Carrefour has increased the number of bonus minutes you can collect per month from 30 to 60, making it a somewhat better deal, particularly if you like to spend 600 zloty a month at Carrefour or don't mind spending a few minutes looking for discarded shopping receipts in shopping carts.

Mova is now offering 50 zloty bonus to customers who port their numbers to it. Which might make it a good option for someone looking to escape from a contract, especially if they shop at Carrefour a lot.

Play does the same (maybe quite better) and their offer is IMHO much better. On the other hand, Carrefour is expensive supermarket ;)

True, and I'd tell my wife to switch from her Era contract to Play Fresh if it didn't mean that calling her would cost twice as much. :-(

At the risk of drifting slightly OT, I'm wondering if we have any updates regarding the current options of porting numbers to prepaid in Poland. You can do it to Play and Mova, which are desperately trying to increase their customer numbers. It's not something that the others seem to mention, and you still can't do it to Heyah, unfortunately.

I think you're wrong. Here (in Polish) they say, you can port your number to Heyah.
In English: "Join Heyah! If you have prepaid from other operator and you want to change it saving your number, nothing stops you, join Heyah and we will do all paper work for you!"
And you have to fill two papers and send them to Heyah.

I'm not only sure if you can port from Era to Heyah, but from other networks yes.

You are right, I was relying on my memory from a few months ago when this wasn't possible. According to a sales rep I talked to, you can indeed switch to Heyah from an Era contract. So it seems that number portability isn't a problem anymore - most operators seem to charge 50 zloty to release your number, but Carrefour, and possibly others, give you 50 zloty credit to compensate.

I was wrong. You can't port your number from Era to Heyah. My wife just tried it and received a letter explaining that since they are the same company, they're not required to allow number porting, and so they don't. So they would evidently rather lose a customer when she ports to Play instead.

Number porting in Poland is free now and it's possible to port a ported number back to the same operator. I don't know for sure if anyone has done it but at least theoretically it's possible to port Era <-> Heyah or Simplus <-> 36.6 "via" another operator :-).

When she told Era she was considering porting her contract to another operator, they offered her the chance to switch to Tak Tak (prepaid), but still not Heyah. So Play Fresh it will probably be (for now).

FWIW, this article states that MVNOs in Poland have a grand total of 130,000 users. If so, I can't imagine that many are doing particularly well. If, say, Carrefour has one-third of all the MVNO business, that's only around a piddly 40,000 users; I get the impression they were expecting several times that. Which might explain all the extra advertising they've been doing.


Total Telecom - Poland's mobile penetration rises to 116.8% in Q3