Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 25 July 2008 17:20
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The introduction of the iPhone 3Ghasn’t helped matters either, putting more people on a mobile network to with devices that can chew through data and add extra strain to network capacity.
But we are unfortunately stuck in this world. Carriers will likely moan and complain that building extra capacity costs money.
But what are they in the business of providing a network service for? Billions of dollars of profit is made. Sure, some of this is profit and goes into the bank, as it should.
But if capacity is being used up, making services slow – or if capacity is priced too high to blunt heavier data usage on the network, telcos should be expanding the capacity.
After all, we now live in a world where wireless data is essentially as ubiquitous as wireless voice. The difference is the massive disparity in pricing for such services.
Sadly there is no simple solution beyond wishing the networks to make their prices cheaper and letting competitive pressures do their work.
3 Mobile’s introduction of the X-Series pricing for mobile data, and cheaper 3.5G data over wireless USB and PCMCIA/ExpressCard modems was a revolution and did force companies such as Vodafone and Optus to introduce much better plans of their own.
But for now we seem stuck in a data pricing rut. In all honesty, data caps should be doubled or tripled for the money.
Theoretically this will eventually happen anyway. But there’s no harm in wanting for it to happen faster, so consumers and businesses get much better wireless data pricing and value.
Continued on page 3.
