Vodafone Hutchison Australia chief executive Inaki Berroeta has weighed in to the war for mobile phone customers, saying the company will use new plans with free international calls and more download data to accelerate the rise of its customer base despite hot competition from Telstra and Optus.
Australia's third-largest telecommunications provider on Wednesday announced it was revamping its mobile plans with unlimited national calls and text messages for every single pre-paid and post-paid customer. Post-paid customers are those who get monthly bills for their network use. 
Customers who buy SIM-only plans worth more than $50 per month and post-paid customers spending over $80 per month will also get unlimited calls to 10 countries including China, India, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
"We are growing customers and we are growing revenues," he said. "This is what we said we were going to do, this is what we wanted to do and this is why our shareholders our quite happy with the way that the business is performing.
"A year ago we were all the way negative and there's been a dramatic shift in the performance in the business on the back of customer growth ... and on the back of the type of customers that are coming to Vodafone [because] they're data-rich customers that are using their smartphones heavily."

Head to head
Mr Berroeta's tough talk will go head to head with comments from Telstra chief executive Andy Penn, who last week announced Australia's biggest telecommunications company would ensure it had the nation's best mobile network even if it eroded revenues and profits.
Vodafone Australia is fighting hard to maintain a foothold in the market as Telstra ramps up its investments in mobile networks and content partnerships, and Singtel-Optus boosts its bundling discounts for customers with fixed-line broadband and mobile phone accounts.
Telstra on Tuesday was given the exclusive live mobile-streaming rights and digital replay rights for AFL matches over the next six years as part of a $2.5 billion broadcast rights package with Seven West Media and News Corp.
This will include replay rights on its new Telstra TV device, which is essentially a web-focused set top box. The NRL are still in talks over its digital streaming rights.
But Mr Berroeta said he was not concerned by or interested in buying Australian sporting rights for his customers.
"Sports rights in this market will evolve to more of an online proposition in the coming years," he said. "We'll continue delivering our services, we have our content and on the sports for now we're not interested in that front."

Double-data promotion
The amount of actual data being offered to customers has been reduced because Vodafone Australia was offering a temporary double-data promotion, which gave $80-per-month postpaid plans a 9 gigabyte data cap for the life of their contract.  Post-paid customers are those who get monthly bills for their network use, rather than paying upfront
Customers will now see their baseline data allowance increase with the possibility of new double-data promotions for new users.
More users will also be able to turn their mobile plans into shared accounts that pool data allowances. This is designed to help families and extra controls have been put in place to help parents control their amount of downloading done by children to prevent bill shock.
Both Mr Berroeta and Vodafone Australia chief marketing officer Loo Fun Chee were adamant the telco would continue to accelerate the growth of its post-paid customer base.
"Yes, that's where we see the growth," Mr Berroeta said. "All in all, year on year, we have over 100,000 more customers and most of this growth is coming from post-paid."