Telenor: "Customers Say that Shared Data Plans are Bad Idea - But .."

In an interview to Jason Patterson on Huawei's WinWin magazine, Telenor's Group VP for Product & Business Development, Gisle Pedersen (pictured), shared some of the group's views on mobile broadband pricing models and shared data plans:

"I think that one global trend that we see all over is that as people are using much more data, they want prediction of what it is going to cost, which means that the model is that you get a fixed price for a certain amount of data ..  from the point of view of our market, we have seen charging for tethering and charging for multiple SIMs that are going from the same data amount; this is what you see as the most innovative. You can have the same users but they put their SIMs into different devices. It makes sense when you have a fixed amount, say 1GB of data, and you want to use it on several devices – a pad, a smartphone, a PC dongle, whatever. That is definitely something that we are seeing in our market. And just to be clear on this, I don’t think the customers necessarily see that as a great innovation.

We asked a focus group “would you like to share data from a big bucket throughout your entire family?” And they were very clear about this, they felt that this was a bad idea  ..But as a way to monetize the data network, these are important things that we are doing .. There’s always an inherent risk that you don’t get your money back from the big investment in data. You just have to look into this in general. But, this is a more general comment, not really specific to the data sharing plans".

See "Telenor Norway: A few bits of wisdom" - here.