A report on The Register claims that T-Mobile is about to launch a Web 'n' Walk tariff that removes the VoIP restriction and also allows IM. This is an interesting evolution of the product which should help its adoption, but risks going backwards by re-enforcing the emphasis on VoIP rather than other data applications.
When the service was first released, we did a study on the cost of mobile data, praising T-Mobile for its lateral thinking and opening the market for non-voice data applications.
Mobos were setting prices prohibitively high in order to protect their voice revenues. At 25p per MB, VoIP is about equivalent to a 6ppm voice tariff. Unsurprisingly, data prices started at 30p per MB. That protected voice revenues, but there are very few applications which are viable at 30p per MB, let along Vodafone's £2.50, so the mobile data market as a whole was being suffocated.
Then, along came Web 'n' Walk at much lower prices: £7.50 for unlimited (actually 1GB) of data. Considering that I pay £8 to Orange for 10 MB, that was a step change. I argued at the time that this would allow T-Mobile to begin to exploit other mobile data niches.
It seems that the product has not been as successful as they would like and have now decided to remove the VoIP restriction in a new range of tariffs for consumers paying £22.50 per month or business users paying £44. This places them favourably alongside Orange's £75 unlimited data product, but is still moving back towards the "price VoIP out of the market" strategy.
It would be nice to see more being done on applications other than VoIP. We already have mobile voice capabilities, why are we re-inventing them? It would be good to see much more being done in other areas like music, gaming and entertainment. There are a lot of people who sit on trains for a significant proportion of their day - maybe we should give them something to do, instead of worrying about how to make their telephone calls a few percent cheaper...
# posted by Jeremy Penston @ 10/02/2006 04:21:00 PM
