John Linton ........I wonder how that "person" is identified?
I read this article earlier this morning:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704025304575284961190193360.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_LEFTTopNews
which was a follow up article to one I cited last week. Near the bottom of the page it cites a recent survey that purports to show how much data mobile phone users download:
"A study released by Consumer Reports in February found that consumers
using iPhones eat up an average of 273 megabytes of data a month,
compared with 54 megabytes for BlackBerry users and 150 megabytes for
consumers of other smartphones"
These figures seem to be in line with Telstra's view of the mobile handset user world so they are almost certainly indicative of at least something or other. However as AT&T has made the recent very significant change to its plans and, as the article itself points out that growth in data usage will continue to increase at a faster rate as more data demanding applications are used by mobile handset users, the use of data will continue to grow. The reason for the need of increased data revenue is to compensate for the increasing use of moip by US mobile telephone users as evidenced by:
"How consumers will react to the change will affect not only their bills,
but a key area of growth for wireless carriers, which are betting that
revenue from selling data services will rise fast enough to outpace the
decline in their revenue from ordinary cellphone calls."
American mobile telephony users have accepted moip more quickly than their Australian counterparts and the use of moip is growing at an accelerating rate. I continue to use moip as I have done since our early versions getting on for two years ago now and I have no problems. An increasing number of Exetel customers are downloading our MoIP app from the Exetel USer Facilities and sales via the Apple iStore increase week on week - presumably by mobile users who are not Exetel customers and are not even in Australia. As a simle user I don't comprehend why anyone would use the carrier's capped plans when 10 cents unlimited calls from mobiles to wire line numbers are available but then I never did understand those scenarios.
What this article, and the previous one, clearly imply is that even a network as huge as AT&T's wireless network is not large enough to sustain 10% of their mobile users being given 'unlimited data plans' for $US30.00 per month - if not right now then when AT&T looks in to the not too distant future. Given the cost of data, even at a massive US carrier's internal 'buy' rates I am slightly surprised at this radical turn around after such a short time. With all the decades of experience and the demographics and customer analysis data available to AT&T's planners they seem to have totally misunderstood what actually happened which, literally, amazes me. Why did they get it so wrong?
It's one thing for a company of Exetel's size to get assumptions on 'unlimited' usage plans totally wrong but it surprises me that such a sophisticated planning company like AT&T could do something like that. Which brings in to question the validity of the figures in this article - if the average data down loader averages so little what is it that panicked AT&T in to withdrawing their unlimited data plans so soon after announcing them? I suppose the second question is - will the other US carriers do the same?........and the question that interests us - what will Telstra and Optus do who face no competition and are therefore not pressured by anything other than each other?
The current wholesale cost of wireless data to a service provider such as Exetel in the UK is less than one fifth of what we pay to our Australian suppliers. I have no idea what the wholesale cost is in the USA but the cost in EU countries is between one tenth and one third of what we pay in Australia. You can only assume that the various carriers costs in those countries are lower than their wholesale costs. But even at those low costs it now seems that 'unlimited', or indeed anything above 2 gbytes is not 'economically viable'. A surprising reversal of a trend I have been tracking for the past four years.
Perhaps I need to learn a lot more about wireless futures.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46