mTrends – mobile media lifestyle trends – m-trends.org

Just back in October I’ve been writing about how Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO’s) in Germany have revolutionized the mobile telephony landscape in Germany. Due to their fierce competition, prices have been tumbling like never before. At the time, I was hoping that MVNOs would sooner or later also start to do something about mobile Internet prices as prepaid mobile Internet access was still at around 20 euros per megabyte (!!!). After Three’s recent announcement to waive international roaming charges for both voice and data it looks like the second landslide breakthrough of the year for the mobile Internet comes for German prepaid customers.

Just a couple of days ago, two MVNOs (Alditalk and Simyo), both using the mobile network of the KPN subsidiary E-Plus have announced that they’ve slashed prices for prepaid mobile Internet access by 97%. Their new price: 24 cents per megabyte, to be paid in steps of around 10-50 kBytes depending on the operator. The minimum price for connecting to the net from a mobile phone is thus around 1 to 4 cents. I consume about 30-40 megabytes per month for applications running on my mobile phone such as eMail, weather forecasts, blog reading, Flickr picture uploads, blog entry uploads, instant messaging and web browsing. With their new offer I can now do this for about 10 euros a month without the need to have a 24 month post paid contract and a sharp eye on the data counter.

The real breakthrough lies somewhere else, however. I talk to lots of people about how my mobile device allows me to stay connected with the applications mentioned above and how this enriches my life. People are usually quite interested but my arguments always disintegrated at the point when people asked about the cost. Once explaining that a post-paid contract and a minimum data subscription fee of 10 euros is required the discussion came to an abrupt end. Most if not all people then said that they were not willing to give up their prepaid SIM card for this. Even people with postpaid contracts were not willing to pay a fixed amount of 10 euros extra as operators so far insisted on a minimum data package instead of charging a reasonable price per kilobyte. I don’t think it was the 10 euros people cared about so much but rather the fact that operators wanted people to pay this sum up front each month.
This change of mind also opens the mobile Internet for students in high schools and universities who’ve seen the benefits but also shied away from minimum subscription fees and contracts. On top, students and researchers are the number one source of new and creative ideas and are one reason for the Internet being what it is today. With this move, we are moving one step closer to the mobile killer environment!

And, as a closing note, I hope similar tariffing will come to Spain as well soon, so Rudy can unblock GPRS for his kids and show them what the mobile Internet really is