In a report published by Openwave, they analyzed the data usage on an unnamed operator that is the 2nd largest provider in the country they’re in and has over 30 million subscribers. With little surprise, they discovered that roughly 2.5% of those 30 million people generator about 70% of the traffic buzzing through the sky. These “extreme” users generate triple the amount of traffic that “heavy users” do, nine times more than “medium users”, and seventy times more than “light users”. They go on to say that while the amount of data going over wireless networks is set to increase by a factor of 30, the pricing of said data will grow at a much slower pace. How should operators then price their services is what Openwave discusses in their 4 page report, and of course they’re going to recommend the solutions that they’ve built that enable things like limiting the amount of bandwidth a user has access to during peak times, or slowing down popular sites like Facebook so they could charge you more to get speedier access. In other words, they want operators to be evil.
The reality of today’s mobile data market is that operators in the United States are now beginning to offer data buckets. Pay a certain amount of money, get a certain amount of megabytes. The more you pay, the more data you get. This, in my view, is suicidal, and for he life of me I can’t understand why these wireless companies simply don’t price their mobile data like they do fixed data. Why is it that Verizon can charge you 3 different prices for unlimited data on your home broadband connection, more money spent equals more bandwidth delivered, yet they can’t do the same thing on the wireless side? That’s how things work here in Finland, with an operator known as Saunalahti offering unlimited data across all their mobile packages, but giving you a max speed of only 384 Kbps for 4.90 EUR/month, max speed of 1 Mbps for 9.90 EUR/month, and then no speed caps for 13.90 EUR/month.