You can hardly avoid the adverts for the various mobile operator's offers for 'internet on your mobile' assorted forms of flat rate data.
The concept is great. Pay around £7.50 a month and get 'unlimited' access to the internet from your phone.
Inevitably mobile customers will view this in a similar way to broad band - pay a flat fee and connect to the internet however you want, within reasonable download limits.
However when you look at the conditions there's always a catch.
Take T-Mobile's Web'nWalk. Aside from the terrible spelling/grammer of the name (!), the conditions state that:
Web'n'Walk - £7.50pm - 1GB monthly usage + "We do not permit use of this
service to provide modem access for a computer or for peer to peer file
sharing, internet phone calls or instant messaging."
So all you can do is connect to the web via their portal.
Similarly if you travel abroad, they will charge you £7 per megabyte of download. There is a news report where one of their director's even admitted this charge was excessive. However, the time that you need your mobile email the most is when you are away.
So far only around 20% of mobile users have taken up a flat rate data tariff. In terms of downloading content from web or mobile sites, that's still a lot of people, over 15 million. But what about the majority of mobile users who are not on a flat rate data tariff?
With home broadband you pay your monthly money and get a connection. If you don't pay, you don't get on the internet. Pretty simple.
With mobile, the majority of people can connect to mobile web. Unfortunately for 80% of users that means they will be paying up to £7 per megabyte to d so. Yet very few people realise the levels of the costs.
The problem for mobile content providers is that a music track, for exammple may cost £1 or less to buy but for 3 minutes, it may cost £21 in datacharges to download. As soon as a user realises this then they are unlikely to every download through their phone again.
There are a number of solutions to this. The simplest is that the operators should offer a fast data connection for all types of data at a single price to all their users. They should remove the 'pay as you download' tariff as it is unreasonably expensive.
Why should they change to this pricing model?
Currently the operators are only interested in users where there is a billing relationship. In other words they can charge money for some kind of transaction.
Switching to flat rate data will change this relationship - but ultimately for the good. Flat rate plans for everyone means that more web surfing and downloading will happen. The most popular round for payment on mobile is premium SMS. There will be more downloads and the operators make more money. Simple.
Another alternative would be to include the cost of the data in the download itself. That's effectively what happens with MMS but the size and formats are limited. The idea is that when a mobile user pays for their premium SMS for content, they should not have to pay any more to download it.
Poor user experience brought about by data charges has damaged the mobile content sector. Removing these charges will increase the downloads and ultimtely the revenues of the mobile operators.
No comments:
Post a Comment