At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?
Capped plans in the mobile world are, by and large, anything but. The good news is that Optus has a genuinely capped mobile broadband plan: the bad news is it has others that are not.
Consumer's telecommunications body ACCAN has long railed - with some justification - against the widely used term of capped plans in the mobile industry claiming, quite rightly, that they are anything but capped.
Under the general principle of capped plans, customers pay a set amount per month for a mobile phone or mobile broadband service and once the quota of minutes or megabytes included in the cap is reached they start paying more - through the nose in the case of mobile broadband plans.
So, it was pleasing to see last month Optus introduce some genuinely capped plans for mobile broadband. Once the amount of data included in the cap has been reached, users have access only to Optus webmail, OptusZoo and Facebook, at no additional charge until their next billing period.
Curiously Optus did not focus on this fixed price feature in its announcement of the plans. Its press release was headed simply: "Optus launches new Mobile Broadband Cap plans," and the opening sentence focussed on the peak v off-peak split in the data quota, saying: "Optus announced today a new range of mobile broadband cap plans that allow customers to choose how they use their data with different rates for peak and off peak usage."
My cynical interpretation of this apparent reticence is that Optus does not want to create too strong an association of the term 'capped plan' with plans that are truly capped when it intends to continue using (abusing?) the term for plans that are not capped.
For example, today I see advert from Optus for a Samsung Galaxy S on a $49 Optus Cap Plan, headlined "More data so you can play without limits." Play what without limits? Nothing much really: you get unlimited access to Facebook, Twitter and eBay, which to the best of my knowledge are not game sites, and you get 1GB of mobile Internet data. After that you'll be stung at the rate of $250 per GB for any additional 'playing' you choose to indulge in.
It was bad enough when the only so called cap plans were for mobile voice. However offering genuinely capped mobile data plans and then advertising "more data so you can play without limits on a mobile 'cap plan' with "unlimited mobile access within Australia to Facebook, Twitter, eBay and more" (the more was not specified) and slugging users heavily for breaching this non-existent cap is a recipe for customer confusion and dissatisfaction.
It's time the mobile industry's flagrant abuse of the term 'capped plan' was reined in.
Need all the latest news on telecommunications?
If telecoms is your business: you'll find in-depth, industry-specific news, analysis and commentary in ExchangeDaily
Check out a
recent edition (no forms to fill in) or take a free trial
Michelle Thomas
| Smelly Black Dog Internet is proud to announce that the company has signed up for Simtronic Technologies new wholesale broadband service as an…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
