How Long Until A Flat Rate For All Services, For All Users?
by Ewan Spence
Once upon a time, AOL charged their customers by how many minutes they kept their modems connected to the banks of AOL modems. As more and more people signed up, the banks of modems started to struggle. So they raised the cost hoping people would use the service less. The dedicated users didn’t change, and the average users started to drift away. But one day, when they decided a flat monthly rate, people felt free to use the internet, and know that there wouldn’t be any sticker shock each month.
Incidentally, AOL made more in the months after introducing flat rate than per minute billing.
While the telecoms industry can’t make obvious increases in prices, it is only in the last 12 months that flat rate data has been making an impact in Europe – and a bit longer than that in the US. Given the confidence to use a mobile phone for data, people will use it. The S60 application for Jaiku keeps the handset always connected, trickling data about location and calendar data, and the FAQ states it uses around 10mb a month – but you’re not going to know that for 4-6 weeks after that month. So it doesn’t get used.
Add in an ‘all you can eat’ SIM and data usage changes rapidly. There are no worries in checking Gmail, leaving Jaiku running, downloading mapping data on the fly, because the bill is fixed at the end of the month.
At this point, someone mentions roaming – and while it can be a horrible surprise (see the countless ‘I’ve taken my iPhone to Ireland and it was iIncredible’ blog posts) the first murmurings of a sensible data roaming policy are happening in Europe, with Vodafone offering an ‘all you can eat for 24 hours’ payments for international roaming customers for 12 Euros ($16). It’s still pricey, but it is comparable to access via a Wi-Fi hotspot.
The flat rate genie is pretty much leaking at the bottle, and the networks are very slowly moving over to flat rate. I wonder I any of them would be brave enough to step up and flat rate everything. All your data, flat rate. All your text messages, flat rate. All your voice calls, flat rate. Just pop down any sensible monthly bill per month, and just use your phone.
Anyone?
