Are U.S. Mobile Service Plans Expensive? Or Affordable?

Are U.S. mobile users paying too much?
Some data might suggest so. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for example, suggests that U.S. prices are "high," based on a standard set of usage buckets.

But there's a problem. Most U.S. users talk about four times as much as some Europeans do.

The problem is that the OECD study uses definitions of "low," "medium" and "high" use that might describe usage in the Netherlands, but are wildly inapplicable to typical U.S. usage rates, says George Ford, Chief Economist of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies.

Specifically, the OECD analysis calls 44 outbound minutes a month "low," 114 outbound minutes medium and 246 minutes outbound "high" levels of usage.

The average mobile consumer in the United States uses 800 minutes a month, about four times as high as the OECD "high usage" level. Furthermore, the OECD considers 55 text messages a month to be "high use" where the typical U.S. mobile user sends or receives 400 text messages a month.

Since usage plans are directly related to usage, this is an issue that distorts the comparisons, difficult to make under the best of conditions. By definition, the "average" U.S. user is a "high usage" customer. So if U.S. users kept the same behavior patterns, but had to buy plans as the OECD baskets suggest, they would have to pay rates commensurate with very-high usage levels.

In other words, if users in a given country have low usage, and are on low usage plans, then average prices paid will tend to be "lower." In the United States, usage is vastly higher than in Europe.

Normalizing for usage volume, what one finds is that U.S. users pay modest prices for much-higher use. If users in the Netherlands had consumption patterns identical to U.S. mobile users, they would pay very-high prices.

In other words, one cannot simply compare low-usage plans in one country with high-usage plans in another, any more than one can compare low-usage plans in one country with high-usage plans in the same country. The results are not terribly meaningful.

Study Finds Frustration with Mobile Contracts

The biggest cell phone service frustration in the United States is the length of service contracts, a new study by the Brookings Institution finds. About 46 percent of those polled say contracts are among the biggest frustrations.

What is not clear is how much users are willing to pay for handsets in order to retain freedom to switch providers, though.

Roaming charges are an irritant for 20.4 percent of respondents. Other issues that rank among the biggist irritants are the cost of domestic calls, which bothers18.1 percent of respondents, while "lack of features" is an issue for 15.2 percent or those polled.

The inability to use devices on other provider networks concerns 14.8 percent of respondents while lack of interoperability is an issue for 12 percent of survey subjects.

Americans believe (correctly or not) that innovation is driven by new devices made by Apple and Nokia, and new Internet features pioneered by Google. The most popular new cell phone features are games (named by 61.6 percent), local directories (52.9 percent), music (49.8 percent), and chat and instant messaging (39.8 percent).

Consumer concerns are different in other countries where consumers also were polled.

In the United Kingdom, the biggest frustration is the cost of international calls (27.8 percent), followed by the cost of domestic calls (25 percent), the length of service contracts (22.7 percent), and roaming charges (22.3 percent).

For Spaniards, the greatest frustration is the length of service contract (41.1 percent), cost of domestic calls (40.1 percent), roaming charges (25.6 percent), inability to transfer devices (22.8 percent), and the cost of international calls (21.6 percent).

In Japan, the largest problems are the cost of domestic calls (32.3 percent), lack of features (18 percent), lack of interoperability (15.4 percent), length of service contract (14.4 percent), and the slow pace of innovation (14.4 percent).

Pollsters asked cell phone consumers in each country about their willingness to pay more money in order to control their cell phone applications. The country with the greatest willingness to pay more is Spain (50 percent), followed by the United Kingdom (35.7 percent), United States (32.9 percent), and Japan (17.2 percent).

American consumers were most likely to believe innovation came from new devices (32.7 percent), followed by new Internet-based services (28.6 percent), and new voice services (10.4 percent). Those beliefs may not completely align with the innovation process, but do illustrate the sense consumers have that new devices are key for innovation.

To the extent that rapid device turnover actually is directly related to introduction of new services, policymakers would do well to consider how any new mobile regulations might affect the rate and pace of new device propagation.

When asked what was most important to improve their use of cell phones, users named getting less expensive service from mobile carriers (55.5 percent) as their top item.

Business PCs: 43% Mobile by 2012, Study Says

A Microsoft-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Research suggests that worker mobility and office decentralization will become key issues for the enterprise and small- to medium-sized businesses in coming years, as worker mobility increases.

The report, "The Costs and Challenges Associated With Supporting Today's Informational Workers," suggests that mobile PCs will constitute some 43 percent of corporate PCs by 2012, an 11 percent increase over the current situation. That also suggests the number of desktop PCs will decline to 57 percent in three years’ time, down from 68 percent today.

Other parts of the study found that workers within the enterprise and SMBs have become increasingly decentralized, with 29 percent working out of branch or remote offices, five percent out of external worksites, four percent out of home offices, and six percent “mostly mobile.”

The report found that only 30 percent of firms were highly centralized in “one or a few offices,” though that number was expected to increase marginally to 34 percent by 2012.

20% of Tweets are Directly About Products

About 20 percent of tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State.

"People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services," said Jansen. "Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services."

Also, while many marketers worry about what people may say about their firms, "a lot of the brand comments were positive," Jansen says.

Jansen, along with IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, investigated micro-communicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. Their results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.

The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study. The team looked for tweets mentioning a brand and why the brand was mentioned -- to inform others, express a view on the brand or something else -- and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.

"Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge and customer relationship," say Jansen.

And though some are uncertain about Twitter's enduring value, Jansen sees Twitter succeeding, because people and businesses are starting to make profits from it, using it as a creative way to market their products.

"It may be right up there with email in terms of its communication impact," Jansen also argues.

Verizon Tries to Block Avaya Purchase of Nortel

Verizon Communications has moved to block a planned $900 million sale of Nortel Network Corp.'s Government Solutions group and DiamondWare Ltd., a Nortel-owned maker of softphones, to Avaya Inc., arguing there will be "serious consequences to safety, welfare and security" because of feared disruption of U.S. government and military communications networks and emergency systems across the United States and Canada.

The dispute--which has a major customer objecting to practices of a major supplier, appears in part to be a contract dispute. Avaya of course says it intends to honor all existing Nortel contracts, but Verizon and Avaya apparently have not been able to agreement in language that suits Verizon.

An outstanding patent infringement lawsuit against Verizon in Texas, slated for trial next year, appears to be an issue. Avaya appears to believe Nortel might face some liability, and doesn't want to take over Nortel's "highly contingent" liability in the patent case.

If Avaya buys Nortel's business and leaves Verizon's contracts behind, Verizon will have only a few months to get a new source of equipment, software, maintenance and support for systems that are at the heart of U.S. emergency response, anti-terrorism and national defense systems, Verizon argues.

MetroPCS to Offer 4G in 2010: Consumers Win

MetroPCS Communications, a leading provider of unlimited prepaid wireless communications service will launch Long Term Evolution 4G mobile broadband services in the second half of 2010. Ericsson will provide infrastructure while Samsung Telecommunications America will provide the company's initial LTE handsets.

The network upgrade likely will have wider implications for consumers using other service providers as well, as MetroPCS likely will offer more affordable mobile broadband prices and packaging than have been available to date, from tier one and other providers.

As MetroPCS has made a market largely on users who are substituting mobile service for landline, one suspects the firm might be tempted to try the same thing for broadband access.

As MetroPCS uses the CDMA air interface for voice and text services, it will introduce dual-mode LTE/CDMA devices as part of the plan.

MetroPCS has been a price leader in the prepaid space, and the new capabilities likely will put pressure on the tier one carriers to lower their mobile broadband tariffs further.

One wonders whether the tier one providers might not also, as part of that shift, create differentiated mobile broadband tiers that are quite a bit more "application specific," or at least tailored in key ways to the usage profiles different users have.

Business users have different requirements in the reliability area than casual consumer users. Heavy users of mobile video will require more bandwidth, but might also be offered heavy-usage plans at a higher price.

The challenge is to balance simplicity with consumption. The problem right now is that few mobile users have any idea how much bandwidth they consume and for which applications. That means consumers will have a hard time figuring out which plans they ought to buy.

Providers, on the other hand, might need to work on their billing and operations processes so they can flexibly track usage, make that information available to end users, and then create differentiated plans tailored to actual end user behavior.

It isn't yet clear what packaging innovations MetroPCS might be willing to introduce. But it has long positioned itself in several clear market segments, including users who can replace wired telephone service with a mobile, especially users with low needs for mobile support outside of the home market.

Its mobile broadband efforts are likely to build on that profile.

Telstra Gets Ultimatum: Divest Voluntarily or Forcibly

Telstra, Australia's incumbent communications service provider, has been given an ultimatum by the Australian government: either cease to be both an owner of and service provider or face forced functional separation.

If it does not act voluntarily to break itself up into two new companies--one providing wholesale access to all retailers while the second firm is limited to retail operations, Telstra will be forced by a proposed law to do so by government edict.

Communication Minister Stephen Conroy has introduced legislation that, if implemented, will separate Telstra's network operations from its retail sales and marketing.

According to the proposed legislation, Telstra will have two choices about the structural separation.

It can create a new company and transfer its fixed-line assets to that company, or it can move its fixed-line traffic to the new national broadband network and scrap its existing access network. Telstra, in other words, would have to strand 100 percent of its access assets.

If Telstra does not agree to voluntary structural separation the bill provides for forced functional separation. Under the forced separation plan, Telstra would be required to conduct its network operations and wholesale functions at arm's length from the rest of the company; provide the same information and access to regulated services on equivalent price and non-price terms to its retail business and to non-Telstra wholesale customers; and put in place and maintain strong internal governance structures that provide transparency for the regulator and access seekers that equivalence arrangements are effective.