Mobile Data: Genius strategy and why you're screwing up the mobile industry

If you really want unlimited mobile data on Vodafone, you can have it for £45 a month.

Likewise, Orange will sell you unlimited off-peak data if you buy one of their £75 a month price plans.

Of course, you can get 1gb of data for £7.50 a month from T-Mobile.

However, most people don’t want to swap. That’s where the genius operator strategy lies. I am routinely surprised by how many people I meet or talk with — this means YOU, probably — who count themselves as mobile data experts, geeks or know-alls. Invariably they have top of the range devices… and mobile data is extremely important to them….

… but they still pay £3 a meg. Or worse, £7 a meg on some o2 plans, someone was telling me the other day.

They complain. They think it’s unreasonable. They get wound up. Some begin foaming at the mouth. Within seconds, they’re listing the exact amount of money they spent on data over the last five consecutive months. It’s lots of money they’re spending.

There’s a solution, but it involves changing to T-Mobile.

Instead the Vodafone, Orange & o2 genius strategy — the gamble — is that the overwhelming majority can’t be arsed to do anything about it. They’ll experience data-creep. Before they know it, they’ll be adding an extra £15 – £20 a month in data revenues. It’ll become the norm. Yes there will be a bit of shouting, but you know, you’ve perhaps boosted APRU of this set of users by 25% and their demand is more or less inelastic. You can spin out the APRU increase for at least another year or so charging £3 a meg.

In fact, I wonder how long you all will put up with it.

How long until you say ‘£3 a meg is just stupid?’

Do you wait another year?

Do you sit and hope that the market will move?

Well. It’s already moved and it’s £3 a meg until the operators reckon enough of you are *actually* in danger of migrating to T-Mobile.

You owe it to the mobile industry to do something about this. If you own a handset purchased in the last 6 months and you catch yourself NOT using mobile data because of the cost, you have absolutely no excuse. No excuse at all. You shouldn’t have to think. You should be able to just use the data without regard for cost.

While the majority of mobile geeks around me continue to ARSE about restricting their data use to 1-2 meg a month ‘to keep the costs down,’ the industry isn’t going to move forward. Mobile podcasting will get nowhere. Mobile data services will continue to limp along. Mobile operators have little incentive to innovate much because the status quo is actually reasonably acceptable to them. There’s no need to introduce reasonably priced ‘unlimited data’ plans when no one — not even the mobile geeks — is bothering to use data more than a few meg each.

So how long will you let it go? I’ve started being direct with people now. Bring out a modern handset and proceed to send a sodding text message instead of emailing a photo up to Moblog or a viedo to Nakama, and 9 times out of 10, you run the risk of me grabbing the handset and throwing it into the gutter. Tell me that you’re ‘happy with your N73’ but that you are ‘being careful with your data usage’ and there’s no going back: I’ll insist you take the handset back to the shop and swap it for a shit 6200 Nokia. I’ll wait while you do it to make sure it happens. That, or the phone deserves to be rammed where the sun doesn’t shine.

Promise me this: If we get to June next year and there’s no change, if you’re all still flouncing around worrying about your data bills, promise me you’ll swap your contract to T-Mobile.

Do you know, I am willing to bet that the vast majority of the people I met at Swedish Beers last month fall into the above ‘excellent phone, but I don’t use it properly ‘cos of the data cost’ category — and that is ridiculous.

Either swallow the £3/meg cost, stop worrying about your data usage and expense it, or get a T-Mobile 7.50/month plan.

It’s silly now. 6 months ago, with just a few handsets capable of high resolution imaging, 3g and video, fair enough. But now, with the next generation of 3.2 megapixel handsets out in the wild, all capable of delivering a huge array of data services, well, it’s just plain stupid.

When your phone can take a 400k 2 or 3 megapixel image, you should be able to painlessly send that to your favourite online service without having to resize it to 40k. You shouldn’t have to think that the image is gonna cost £1.50ish to upload. It shouldn’t be costing anywhere near that. Last month I did about 300 meg of data. Pictures, video, application usage, web browsing. At minimum you should be doing that too, if, in particular, you’re sitting there with a Nokia N73, N80, in fact any N series or camera-ready E series or Sony Ericsson K800.

You’re not worthy of your handset if it’s massively data capable and you’re sat there worrying about the data costs. Either swap to T-Mobile, put up with your existing operator data charges or go and buy yourself a £50 Sony CMD Z5 from ebay — you know, a phone that doesn’t do data.

To be clear, I’m no huge fan of T-Mobile per se. I think the £7.50 data deal is good. But I’m not necessarily suggesting everyone swap to them. I’m suggesting that waving your top of the line Nokia in my face whilst telling me that you only use it for calls and texts because of the ‘data costs’ is simply unacceptable.