3's X-Series looks set to shake up mobile broadband pricing

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 27 March 2007 23:56

Your IT - Entertainment

The company that offers the cheapest wireless broadband in Australia is a company called Unwired who use pre-WiMAX technology (which they promise to upgrade to actual WiMAX technology in the not-too distant future). Their Ethernet or USB based external wireless broadband modems offer 12Gb for a price of approximately AUD $100, at a speed of up to 1Mbps, while their PCMCIA data card offers the same download limit, at a similar price, although at a maximum speed of 750kbps.

Unfortunately, this is only offered in Sydney and Melbourne, but as you can see, delivers fixed broadband pricing to a wireless broadband environment. Additionally in the ‘unfortunately’ stakes, this offering, which has been available for well over a year, has seemingly done little to change the pricing structure of competing cellular based mobile broadband providers, likely because it was first only available in Sydney, and then Melbourne, but offers no other wireless roaming capabilities, even if it were at the lowly speed of GPRS.

The reality of Unwired is that if you do not live in Sydney or Melbourne, you can’t take advantage of their much more generous download limits, and their country-wide WiMAX rollout is still in the future, although when it does finally arrive, it will no doubt place more pressure on cellular mobile broadband providers to offer even more compelling pricing than the X-Series currently offers.

So, it seems that 3 Mobile’s X-Series will be the global catalyst to force competing mobile broadband providers to look at – and start offering – much more realistic pricing, even if they can claim a massively greater range and hugely faster speeds than 3 Mobile’s ‘up to’ 3.6Mbps network can currently deliver.

Given the widespread proliferation of 3G mobile broadband PCMCIA cards (and the emergence of 3.5G ExpressCard modems), a revolution in data pricing over mobile networks simply can’t come soon enough, at least as far as users are concerned.

For now, we will just have to wait and see how 3 Mobile’s competitors respond in the local market, but the expectation of consumers and fairly priced access to mobile broadband download limits and cool inclusions like Skype minutes has certainly throw down the gauntlet to competitors that 3 Mobile is serious about the mobile cell phone market, in terms of pricing for consumers and 3 growing their bottom line and subscriber numbers.

However 3 Mobile’s competitors choose to respond, from a consumer’s point of view, anything that can dramatically lower the cost of mobile broadband while still offering relatively generous download packages is a most wonderful thing, and is something we can only heartily encourage 3 Mobile’s competitors to evaluate and imitate (if not better it) to do, as quickly as possible, transforming the Internet and online capabilities of the humble mobile cell phone handset even more vigorously than before, and letting mobile broadband users actually use and download goodly amounts of data without needing to worry how much it is costing per month or having to big fees if going over the mobile broadband limit.

So, in case you couldn’t tell, 3 Mobile’s new ‘X-Series’, offerings and pricing certainly look very compelling indeed. Only time will tell how successful they will be or what their competitors will say, but for now, this is one revolution in mobile broadband pricing that all mobile users have been waiting for!