1st crusade: Voice, 2nd Crusade: Text, 3rd Crusade: Data
Njar posted this comment earlier today responding to the news that Three’s X-Series really is unlimited.
I thought it deserved it’s own post.
Here is is:
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Njar writes: What’s excellent here, is that these two carriers are pitching their stall early and are hoping to pick up all the early adopters of VAS products (3rd party or carrier providers/offered), such as applications (games etc), web2.0 products such as sling and shozu/flickr and all the other wondrous products out there now or soon to come. Just as punters shifted to Orange in the late 90’s with the advent of the ‘Every-Day-50′ tariff, and O2 in the early 00’s with their SMS text bundles, let’s hope there is a noticeable shift towards these carriers.
The first to market advantage particularly as demonstrated by O2’s ascent into being ‘THE’ pre-paid SMS senders network, can be massive. The carriers that don’t move to free/unlimited data are unlikely to lose noticeable business initially, but they’ll end up losing some of their highest ARPU generating users. As the voice market becomes more and more competitive ergo less profitable, the shift from an MNO perspective needs to be to generate profit in other areas. De facto high ARPU users of the future (those that care about data rates) will now start migrating over to the unlimited data plan carriers. With any sense the other carriers will be thinking this already and one would suspect and hope that their plans to counter are in development.
Today, Vodafone in particular ought to lose customers. If you’re not a corporate then you will be better looked after commercially elsewhere. As seen in the latest Ofcom report on such matters, Vodafone’s profitability comes off the back of voice, and more precisely inflated voice costs. The old adage of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ mentality springs to mind. I appreciate that Vodafone would be mad to risk the loss of their corporate market just now, but over time market forces will drive their business down nonetheless.
Ironically given it’s user base demographic, Vodafone almost certainly has the least to lose and the very most to gain by offering an unlimited data plan. They’ve changed Vodafone Live to ‘free to browse’, which was a token step in the right direction, but why stop there? I would envisage given it’s proportionally lower representation of ‘up and coming data users’ anyway, that the benefits would far outweigh the negatives, not least of all because the users benefiting from a data bundle, would still be sending ridiculously expensive SMS and making pricey voice calls whilst they’re with the carrier.
The battle line has been drawn; the first crusade was in voice, the second in text messaging, the third and arguably most important (since the future of the mobile web hinges on it) is that of data rates. Full credit as I say to Three and T-Mobile for striking the first blow, here’s hoping the other carriers counter-strike soon..
now.. back to work. Ho-hum.
