Many of the countrys wireless broadband carriers are currently looking at charging their customers based on their internet usage in order to cover the huge sums of money they have poured into increasing the capacity of their networks.
With improvements to the capacity of their networks costing wireless broadband telecommunications company billions of dollars the carriers are now having to seriously consider how to charge their users for accessing their networks based on the fact that only a small number of users are responsible for most of the data traffic travelling over these networks.
For most carriers, however, there are a variety of issues they will have to face if they decide to go for the usage-based pricing option and although it may appear to be quite a simple solution metered charging can often be quite complicated. Many carriers are likely to consider their own business situation carefully before they look at implementing any form of metered service.
The product marketing manager for revenue management at billing systems vendor Amdocs, Rafi Kretchmer said “I think that it is inevitable for the industry to move toward this, otherwise the business model is not sustainable.” The fact that heavy data users are currently being subsidized by low-volume data users was noted by Kretchmer who advised “in order to address this conflict, they realize that to not leave money on the table, they must differentiate the pricing.”
The director of product management at Covergys, Alastair Hanlon also agreed with this view saying “It’s a necessary consequence of rising usage of mobile data. As usage grows to a level where you’re filling all of the available capacity, you’re going to see a need to somehow control that usage. And price is a good way of doing that.”
Discussions regarding usage-based, metered pricing have recently re-opened based on the huge increase in interest in smartphones and apps that has caused the idea by carriers to make data pricing simpler a serious issue.
Source – Fierce Wireless