Carriers desperately seeking higher mobile data prices

It’s tough out there for carriers. After years of charging people 25 cents to send a few kilobytes of data via text messaging, they’re suddenly dealing with folks that want to watch YouTube videos on their mobile phones and pay a mere $50 for an unlimited plan. The economics don’t work, and as proof we only have to look at the death of the unlimited plan.

Today only 13.5 percent of operators offer a “true” unlimited plan, while 25 percent offer an unlimited plan in name only (but with caveats such as throttling or even an undisclosed cap), according to data gathered by Allot Communications, a network optimization vendor. Allot surveyed 100 operators to discover how they price mobile broadband and discovered about 80 percent had already moved to some form of volume-based pricing (think buckets of bytes) while 35 percent were trying to charge based on the applications used. The percentages don’t add up because some operators offer both types of plans. The end game for operators is to figure out how to get people to use less data or pay more for the privilege, while also steering users to content that makes users happy without straining the network. So maybe they offer unlimited Facebook and charge more for Netflix. After all, the last thing they want to do is to scare people from signing up for data plans for fear of expensive overage fees.