Friday, March 9, 2012
Do Users "Need" Mobile Broadband for Their Tablets?
Do users need a mobile broadband connection for their tablets? Not in all cases, especially when that choice means buying yet one more mobile broadband plan, and when a mobile-capable device costs $100 more than a Wi-Fi-only version.
To the extent that tablets mostly get used in locations where there is Wi-Fi available at no incremental charge, namely home and workplace, there is little marginal incentive, in many cases, to pay a more-expensive device and one additional mobile broadband plan.
Some of us would be that will not fundamentally change until more end users have access to "family or multiple device data plans" that allow a single account to share one bucket of data usage. Those plans are coming, but are not generally available, nor is it clear what the pricing will be.
The expectation would be that such a plan will cost significantly less than buying a separate mobile broadband account for each device on the account.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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