Tolaga Research: "monthly usage restrictions play a considerable role when consumers are choosing between competitive market offers"

 
Philip Marshall (picture), Chief Research Officer, Tolaga Research, provides some analysis on the recent LTE service plans:

"In most cases, with the exception of players like Tele2 and Telenor [here] in Sweden, monthly usage restrictions are being placed on service plans. These restrictions are intended to stem excessive usage that has been seen in the past by a small (single digit) percentage of subscribers, often referred as "bandwidth hogs". The specific usage limits imposed by mobile operators vary dramatically, ranging from 20-30 GBytes/month in many European markets, to 10Gbytes/month or less in the US and 3-5GB/month in other markets like Japan"

See "Adding intelligence to LTE pricing strategies" - here. See also earlier posts on Verizon (here), Vodafone Germany (here)

".. we believe that monthly usage restrictions play a considerable role when consumers are choosing between competitive market offers .. operators will relax monthly usage restrictions in favor of alternative approaches to modulate the usage of "bandwidth hogs", while at the same time improving the overall user experience. These alternative approaches will incorporate network and device intelligence aimed at a variety of approaches, and include performance enhancing capabilities such as:

• Optimizing traffic flows and usage that align with subscriber and service profiles
• Managing the capacity availed to "bandwidth hogs" based on overall traffic demands
• Service distribution strategies that intelligently integrate local area network offload and device caching
• Incorporating advanced pricing and segmentation according to service attributes (such as personalization, and service discovery and integration) that enhance the overall user experience.