I believe that the mobile internet charges are severly restricting the growth of the mobile internet. I base this claim on empirical evidence from the behaviours of people I know. Almost without exception, whenever I mention the idea of browsing on a mobile phone to people, or whenever they see me doing it, they say the same thing: "Oh, that's really expensive, isn't it?" There are people I know who religiously avoid touching the Live! or iMode button on their phones, despite their prominant placement on the handset, based on the fear of a large bill. One person I know has had purchased a new iMode phone and in 2 months had conciously and deliberately avoided pressing the "i" button, despite the fact that this is the key selling point of the phone and associated service.
Is this belief justified? What can we do about it?
It is true that back in the early days of WAP, data charges were initally very high. Combine this with the fact that until the advent of packet data, data was necessarily charged by time spent online rather than bytes consumed, meaning that you were being charged continuously even if you were merely reading a page that you had just fetched. These days, with GPRS and 3G widely available, this is no longer the case.
The problem of perceived high cost remains, however. I feel that this is something that the mobile operators are best placed to address. There are a few relatively straightforward things that they could do to help:
- Explain in simple terms how much data costs. Saying each Kb costs 10c is no good. How big is a page? Is it 100Kb or 1Kb? The average customer has no idea, nor should they be required to. If the per Kb model cannot be explained simply perhaps a new price structure needs to be introduced.
- Help people get over the barrier of sticker shock by notifying them somehow when some threshold is breached e.g. if you are about to breech a €5 barrier for data charges, the customer could be advised of this with an SMS message. This is really important. People like to know that their liability is controlled. This is part of the reason why pre-pay phones are so popular, even though they are often more expensive in the long run.
I firmly believe that data pricing is one of the last major barriers to widespread adoption of the mobile web.
