Vodafone promises more tiers for data hungry customers
Because some contracts are more equal than others
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Nokia World Vodafone boss Vittorio Colao has been telling attendees at Nokia‘s annual shindig that they‘re going to have to get used to tiered pricing, and quickly.
Not that this should come as any great surprise. Flat-rate internet access is not sustainable once customers start making use of it, so this is part of a softening-up process to gauge customer reactions and get people used to the idea that rich people will (one day) be able to buy their way to better internet access than their poorer contemporaries.
Vodafone has already announced its German LTE pricing, which will see customers shunted to 3G connections once they pop their tariff-related cap. Slowing down heavy users is a good strategy, and they'll likely be offered the option of buying some more high-speed capacity at the same time. It would be unsurprising to see the same thing cutting poor users down to 2G speeds - as long as there are 2G networks that is.
The only thing preventing such tariffs, other than some minor technical hurdles, is the risk of customer backlash. The blogosphere reacts badly to this kind of thing and can quickly whip up a media storm. 3 found that out when it started offering priority 3G access to corporate customers.
3‘s proposition works both ways: a poor user on an underutilised cell gets unlimited data, but a rich user on a congested cell gets priority access. 3 wasn‘t even planning to cut anyone off, but even the proposal to restrict users to a single YouTube video stream (surely enough for most mobile users) raised such a backlash that it was dropped.
But the basic premise, that people on corporate tariffs get priority access to 3G data, did remain in place, and still is. Other operators say they‘re evaluating the matter, but the truth is that they can‘t afford not to introduce tiered pricing and are just waiting until we‘ve been told its inevitable so many times that we start to believe it. ®
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COMMENTS
They've already done it, haven't it?
Many operators artificially raise the prices for tethered connections, it's as if the packets from tethered laptops were somehow much more expensive to transmit than packets from mobiles.
T-Mobile already do this in the UK
T-Mobile already do this. Unless you're on their premium 3gb allowance, you're capped at 3G speeds even in HSDPA areas.
Loads of discussion about this on T-Mobile's own forums but the company flatly denies it - although the evidence is stunningly clear-cut!
I thought 3 had dispensed with the 'Unlimited' claim.
In the 5 years I have had a 1gb (now 2) 'unlimited' allowance with 3 I only went over once or twice. The first text I got said that I had gone over my allowance and any more use COULD result in me getting cut off. For the next week every time I logged on I would get the text saying not to but then after the second week they stopped. I think they realised that for the odd time that I did go over compared wit the number of times I got no-where near my allowance limit they couldn't really call it a 'fair use' policy if they did cut me off. I believed that my use was fair. I usually didn't get any where near 1 gig but sometimes I did, that seems fair to me.
NOW however I think 3 were the first of the operators to say 'ok 1gb is not unlimited it's 1gb' so they have dropped the unlimited from the contract. So for the person above who was cut off after going over their 2gb, it's probably cos now that's what they do. It's no longer unlimited, it's 2gb. I contacted them and got my 1gb changed to 2 as I have the TRULY unlimited music downloads from Nokia's Comes With Music service, now called Ovi music and I do use a lot more than 1gb a month now.
£ have been the best as far as I'm concerned. They had a bad rep when they started out but are good enough now. I love em!
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