Comarch expert shares his opinion in the article „The price is wrong” written by Mike Hibberd

Comarch expert shares his opinion in the article „The price is wrong” written by Mike Hibberd.

“Unwilling to become locked into a flat-rate billing structure that would not generate enough revenue to fund the provision of mobile broadband service, operators began to call time on their all-you-can-eat data offerings in 2010” – explains Mike Hibberd. He writes - “The cost of mobile telephony has always been difficult for end users to understand— and responsibility for this lies squarely with mobile operators. After all, most carriers have traditionally shied away from telling their users the truth about the costs involved in providing service.”

Abstract from the article:
It is expected that such strategies will become more prevalent with the widespread introduction of LTE. Vodafone Germany said this year that it will offer its LTE service on a price-per-speed model, charging €e40/month for 10GB of data at 7.2Mbps, e50 for 15GB at 21.6Mbps and e60 for 30GB at 50Mbps. Speed-based pricing certainly offers a greater degree of flexibility than the tiered pricing of the kind introduced by several operators this year. But sector specialists argue that carriers ought to look to more sophisticated, tailored offerings that take advantage of the capabilities of modern pricing, rating and policy management solutions and the range of information available to them. “While, in our opinion, there is no choice for operators but to end their flat rate offerings, we don’t believe that simple tiered pricing structures are enough,” says Pekka Valitalo, market analyst at Polish billing solutions outfit Comarch.

Valitalo argues that carriers should look to offer consumers pricing options based on what they observe about their usage, rather than expect users to understand which volume or speed most suits them.
Nothing comes for free, of course, and for most operators, a non-trivial investment would be required for their billing support systems. Nonetheless, says Valitalo, “this investment would be significantly cheaper than constantly spending to improve network capacity.”

The complete article can  be read in the telecoms.com website >>