data plans

mar 04

Sprint, T-Mobile believe in shared data plans too — just not for consumers

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Both Sprint and T-Mobile have dissed the decision of their larger competitors TO move to shared data plans, claiming consumers would rather have big data buckets or unlimited use available through their individual plans. But apparently that logic doesn’t apply to business customers.

T-Mobile has said it plans to offer shared data pools to its business customers, and on Friday Sprint officially began selling buckets of communal data to its small business customers. The plans are only available through its business sales channels and support a maximum of 30 LTE smartphones, tablets and data modems. Like AT&T and Verizon, Sprint is charging a monthly per-device fee, for instance $40 for a smartphone with unlimited talk and text included. The pricing of the data plans themselves start at $140 a month for 20 GB split between up to 10 devices. At the high end is a 60 GB / $320 plan supporting up 30 lines.

Sprint is also offering a set of shared plans targeting data-only tablets and modems — an interesting use case brought on by the BYOD trend. As employees make their personal smartphones their business handsets, companies may opt to make the tablet or a wirelessly connected laptop the only mobile work tool available to their employees. Sprint is charging $10 a month to connect a tablet, $20 to connect a modem, and offering shared data plans starting at $60 for 10 GB and topping out at 60 GB for $320.

Since last summer Sprint’s mantra has been “Say no to sharing data,” and it has launched advertising and web campaigns that attempted to show how consumers could save money by adopting its individual unlimited plans. Both Sprint and T-Mobile have maintained that not only do subscribers get a better deal with their unlimited plans, but also THAT the lack of A cap makes everything so much simpler.

Why the change of heart when it comes to business plans then? Likely, Sprint and T-Mobile are realizing that the same arguments that work with consumers aren’t going to work with businesses. Small companies value simplicity as well, but they’re willing to take on some complexity if it means saving some cash each month. And on account with 20 or 30 devices, those savings could be substantial.

Buying two unlimited plans at $30 a month for unlimited data might make sense for a family of two, but paying $500 to $600 a month to attach 20 smartphones to the unlimited spigot makes little sense if you can buy an enormous bucket of gigabytes for half the cost. Keep in mind, as well, that neither T-Mobile or Sprint offer unlimited plans for tablets or modems, so any business owner connecting anything besides smartphones would have had to manage caps under the old pricing plans anyway.

I don’t think Sprint and T-Mobile are swallowing the data-sharing pill just yet. For them unlimited is still a key differentiator in the consumer market, but they are likely very concerned that Verizon and AT&T will steal their business customers with these new shared pricing models. That has forced them to respond in kind.

In Sprint’s case at least, it isn’t just responding, it’s attacking. Sprint’s new plans undercut Verizon’s recently launched small business tiers. For instance, Verizon is charging $375 a month for 50 GB of shared data between, while Sprint is offering 60 GB for $350. Sprint and T-Mobile may be forced to play the data share game, but it looks like they’re going to maintain their reputations for offering cheaper service.

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Tagged with: competition • data plans • mobile pricing • shared data

dic 19

The unlimited mobile data plan suffers more casualties

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Consumers keep hoping for an unlimited mobile broadband plan revival, but the opposite keeps happening. What few remaining unlimited plans carriers offer are disappearing – or at least becoming more restrictive.

On Jan. 20, Boost Mobile, one of Sprint’s prepaid brands, will start throttling its so-called unlimited plans after customers surpass 2.5 GB a month, according to a company Facebook post first spotted by FierceWireless. Sprint’s unlimited contract plans will remain unthrottled – a strategy CEO Dan Hesse has stressed is key to differentiating Sprint from the competition – but now both of Sprint’s primary prepaid services, Virgin and Boost, will have usage restrictions.

Broadband Reports confirmed that Clearwire is now experimenting with usage-based pricing plans in 10 cities, selling customers 2 GB a month for $20, 4 GB for $40 or an unlimited package for $60. The 10-city trial aside, all of Clearwire’s current plans are marketed as unlimited, but many customers have complained that throttling policies have kicked in at seemingly arbitrary usage levels.

It’s not clear whether the WiMAX operator maintains those same throttling policies on the new more expensive “unlimited” plan, but considering many Clearwire customers use the service as their primary residential broadband connection, it’s likely throttling will remain in play.

True unlimited plans are becoming harder and harder to come by. AT&T and Verizon both began throttling their grandfathered unlimited customers last year, though neither has set a specific soft cap. New customers have no choice but to choose a tiered or family share plan (in Verizon’s case shared plans are really the only option).

MetroPCS has kept an unlimited plan, though it raised its price. T-Mobile is the one bright spot for unlimited enthusiasts. After getting rid of its unlimited plans last year, it reintroduced them this summer, but they do come with more restrictions than its soft-capped plans, for instance: no using your phone as a hotspot.

Buffet image courtesy of Flickr user Wesley Fryer

Tagged with: Dan Hesse • data caps • data plans • mobile data pricing • Prepaid

giu 27

T-Mobile tinkers with its tablet, dongle plans; offers overage fee option

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While T-Mobile USA has long offered some of the cheapest and most liberal smartphone data plans in the wireless biz, its data plans for tablets and laptop dongles have always left something to be desired. On Wednesday, the carrier revamped its mobile pricing structure, introducing a new 500 MB tier, adjusting some tier prices and adding a new category of unthrottled data plans. The changes aren’t revolutionary, but they will certainly give T-Mo customers more options.

T-Mobile is still offering “classic” and “value” plans, with the latter charging cheaper rates to customers that buy or bring their own devices. But T-Mobile is further subdividing those categories into consumer and business plans. The consumer plans are subject to T-Mobile’s normal soft caps, meaning speeds will be throttled back when customers reach their monthly data allotments. The business plans, however, won’t be throttled. Instead, overage fees ranging from 2 to 10 cents a megabyte will kick in when the hard cap is exceeded. That works out to $20/gigabyte for higher tiers (expensive, but not entirely unreasonable), but scales up to $100/gigabyte for the 500 MB plan (essentially highway robbery).

While any customer can buy either plan, T-Mobile said the overage-fee plans are targeted at business customers who need to keep their high-speed data connections at all times. There’s an advantage to signing up for hard-capped data though: the business plans are between $3 and $5 cheaper than their consumer counterparts.

Apart from introducing the new 500 MB tier — which costs between $20 and 30 depending on the plan — T-Mobile has also tinkered with its existing plan pricing, adjusting some rates upwards and others downward. For instance, you’ll now pay $2 less if you sign up for a classic 2 GB plan ($38/month), but you’ll pay $2 more than you would have previously if you take the equivalent value plan ($32/month).

The end result is that T-Mobile’s value plans are becoming slightly more expensive, which runs counter to its stated policy of driving more customers to an unsubsidized handset model. T-Mobile also launched new prepaid pricing plans last month.

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Tagged with: business data plans • classic • data plans • data tiers • mobile broadband • throttling • value

giu 16

T-Mobile smartphones are data beasts, eating up 760 MB a month

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T-Mobile USA has a well-deserved reputation for having some of the highest volume smartphone users on the mobile Internet. Not only does it have the fastest 3G networks and the most liberal data caps in the industry save Sprint, T-Mobile lets you user your phone’s mobile hotspot capabilities free of charge, allowing your typical user to actually consume the data he or she pays for.

T-Mobile this week revealed just how much that typical smartphone user on its network consumes: 760 MB per month. What’s more subscribers that have its 42 Mbps dual-carrier HSPA+ phones such as the new HTC One S gobble up an astonishing 1.3 GB a month, which proves the obvious: faster networks mean more data used. T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray revealed these details at the NGNM conference in San Francisco during a slide presentation (pdf) that was first reported by the eagle-eyed folks at FierceWireless.

Those figures may not seem huge to GigaOM readers, whom I’m betting tend to be power users. But let’s put those numbers in perspective. Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index calculated the average U.S. smartphone in 2011 consumed only 201 MB per month. Globally, Ericsson’s Traffic and Market Report found that in the first quarter iPhones and Android devices consumed roughly 350 MB per month. T-Mobile’s typical user either doubles or triples those numbers depending on which report you go by, and its power users break the bank completely.

It’s possible that Sprint’s average smartphone usage exceeds T-Mobile, but I doubt it. Sprint does still offer unlimited plans, but a large portion of its smartphones are on its CDMA network, not its soon-to-be-retired WiMAX service. Just as faster speeds increase data consumption, slower speeds limit overall data use. Plus Sprint doesn’t extend free mobile hotspot capabilities to its customers, meaning subscribers are limited to the data they can access directly from their phone screens.

We won’t know, though, until the carriers release information on their average usage rates, which they are loathe to do (in fact, I’m surprised T-Mobile did so). Carriers typically keep that data confidential because if it were it public, it would be glaringly obvious how much we’re getting ripped off. While it’s hard to argue with Sprint’s unlimited policies, AT&T and Verizon both have historically priced their data tiers in ways that nowhere near reflect how the typical smartphone behaves.

According to Chetan Sharma Consulting, only 30 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers exceed 1 GB each month, yet their most common tiers are 2 GB and 3 GB plans. American consumers are paying for a lot of data that they couldn’t possibly consume. Verizon is rectifying that situation, in part, with new shared data plans that scale down to 1 GB a month, but it’s making up the difference by charging customers for required unlimited voice and SMS plans – arguably robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So why is T-Mobile releasing its numbers all of sudden? Well, for one, it has a lot less to be embarrassed about. Though its customers are still well below their caps, T-Mobile customers pay a lot less for data are consuming much more of the allotment they pay for. Also, T-Mobile is trying to convince regulators to nix Verizon’s proposed acquisition of the cable operators’ spectrum. Its key argument is that Verizon is a lousy steward of the public airwaves. By showing just how much its subscribers consume over the limited spectrum resources it owns, T-Mobile is betting it can shame Verizon in front of the Federal Communications Commission.

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