Vodafone Australia’s subscriber base has reached the mark of 4 million attributed to the purchase of Crazy John. As subscriber number continues to rise, the ARPU continues to drop. According to the statistics reported, Vodafone has added more than 186,000 customers, including 76,300 from the $150 million acquisition of Crazy John’s in September. In totality, Vodafone’s subscriber base is more than 3,915,000 customers, marking a growth of 343,000 additional customers, compared to last year.
The question of concern for the operator, though, is the connection between Vodafone’s increasing subscriber base and the attrition of its total average revenue per user (ARPU). Although, the service revenue has grown 8.2% for the quarter, ARPU dropped by 2.1% compared with the same quarter in 2007.

Vodafone Australia Chief Marketing Officer John Casey said that the ARPU decline was not attributable to the addition of Crazy John’s customer base, but rather the rising ranks of 3G data customers that have been joining the telco.
“The proportion of data customers in our subscriber base is increasing and data customers have lower ARPU than voice customers,” Mr Casey said.
“So although voice customers are continuing to use their phones as much as ever, our total ARPUs are being reduced by the impact of the lower data customer ARPU.”

The increase in Vodafone’s data consuming customers has helped the cellco end its third quarter with more than 1.1 million 3G devices on the market, an increase of 49.9% in comparison to third quarter 2007.

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