Most staff at Vodafone shops visited by Commerce Commission mystery shoppers had not heard of a mobile plan the company wanted included in commission benchmarking.
The commission considered Vodafone's You Choose Base Plans had a "plethora" of restrictive conditions, and did not include them in its 2007 annual telecommunications market monitoring report.
Yesterday, the commission said Vodafone had complained about that approach.
The commission said it sent mystery shoppers to at least three different Vodafone retailers in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.
"It found that there was no documentation about the You Choose Base Plans in any of the stores visited, and in most instances staff had never heard of the plans," the commission said.
"In several cases, when specifically asked about the You Choose Base Plans, the staff member serving used the Internet to find details of the plans.
"It appeared that none of the staff spoken to had ever sold a You Choose Base Plan, with one staff member explicitly admitting this to the commission's mystery shopper."
Given those findings, and in light of Vodafone's refusal to disclose to the commission the number of customers on the base plans, it had told Vodafone it intended to continue to exclude the plans from its 2008 monitoring reports, the commission said.
It did not include the plans in its March quarter 2008 report, which was published yesterday.
But Vodafone had last month made the You Choose Base Plans more accessible on its website, and allowed customers to subscribe to them on the Internet without having to visit a retail outlet, the commission said.
It was now reassessing its position and, if satisfied the base plans were readily accessible, would include them in its June quarterly monitoring report.
In the March quarter report out yesterday, the commission said all the mobile plans it did benchmark had not changed in price during the past year.
Those plans continued to rank in the bottom quartile when compared with the cheapest plans in different user groups for each of the 30 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
The commission warned it was difficult to accurately measure how prices faced by telecommunications end-users were moving because of changing buyer behaviour, changing products and complex tariffs such as capped calling.
For fixed plans, the commission has started ranking Vodafone's residential fixed line plan Vodafone Home phone and fixed wireless plan Vodafone Home phone plus.
While the Home phone plus plan used Vodafone's cellular wireless network, and so might not provide the same voice quality as a fixed line service, the commission considered it to be a reasonable substitute for a fixed line service in areas with good Vodafone mobile network coverage.
OECD benchmarking methodology rated the Vodafone Home phone plus national plan as the cheapest New Zealand plan in the residential fixed medium user basket, the commission said.
The Vodafone plan was ranked 18th in a price comparison of the cheapest medium user fixed plans from each of the 30 OECD countries.
TelstraClear's InHome cable plan was the cheapest in this country for the fixed low user basket, while TelstraClear's HomePlan resale plan was New Zealand's cheapest for the fixed high user basket.
The only known price changes in the fixed plans tracked during the past four quarters were Telecom's fixed-to-mobile prices dropping by 4c per minute from September, the commission said.
A further reduction of 2c a minute happened at the start of April and would be picked up in the June quarter report.
