Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Data Caps or Speed Throttling?
Light Reading conducted a short "man in the street" kind of survey (actully in the streets of CTIA 2011 - so not necessarily impartial people) asking consumers whether they prefer a data cap or speed throttling policy for their mobile data service.
See video by Dan Jones (please follow the link to read his bio!), site editor Light Reading Mobile, below or "CTIA 2011: Throttling & the Data Cap Debate" - here.
I believe that this short survey shows the need for better subscriber management and self-provisioning services. For example, some said that they prefer speed throttling since they can’t monitor or estimate usage - so if data-caps are to be used, consumers should have an easy way to monitor usage, top-up quota etc. Same for speed limits - notifications and an option to get back to normal speed should be easy.
Side note - if I am not mistaken, the lady that is interviewed was the author of article I presetned yesterday (Debra Baker - here).
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Form what I can understand, a "consumer" doesn't necessarily know what they prefer in terms of these options. Their concern is getting maximum quality for a good price with minimal limitations. So the "marketing" or "messaging" to the consumers needs to steer away from whether it is a cap or throttling.
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, nobody understands what a MB is or is worth anyway (including the carriers!). Consumers need at the very least more visibility of their data usage. Pricing should be based on the delivery of a service, but carriers don't understand what it really costs them to deliver any particular service (which is in fact a combination of the QoS required and the amount of data transferred with that QoS).