Sent to SMH - There is another area of Vodaphone's activity that needs looking at and that is the use of its name overseas. So far as we could ascertain from questions asked in Malta the company effectively franchises its name to independent overseas companies without any supervision.

Trusting the name "Vodaphone", we entered into phone plans in Sicily with Vodaphone Italia. The service varied from appalling to non existent - Credits just disappeared and no-one including the local "Tobacchis" could sort anything out. One "Tobacchi" spent nearly an hour on the phone to them, so it wasn't just a "language difficulty"

Appealing to the English speaking Vodaphone Agencies outside of Italia was useless. They had no proper technical or managerial relationship that could help. We were left with the impression that overseas persons using Vodaphone's Italian network were at the mercy of very questionable business practices.

This abuse of a company's own name via unsupervised trade name franchising is surely "unfair trading". We specifically emailed Vodaphone in Australia (using Wifi in MacDonalds) and asked if at the very least they would communicate fully with their colleagues in Italy - to no apparent avail. Indeed when it seemed too complicated it appears they just dropped us.

As to what the franchise status of the Australian company using the name is - I didn't ask. All we ever wanted was reliable iphone and ipad services. We got practically nothing, however much we "recharged" our accounts in Sicily

I would never use a company with Vodaphone's trade mark name again - not Italy - not Australia -anywhere!