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Rory Sutherland's Blog

The G in 3G stands for greed, apparently 

Comments:7   Add your comment
Why I think my phone bill may be share-price sensitive. And why any hope of mobile data use is fanciful until the other networks follow 3's lead.

I just got a new 3G handset. More precisely, I just got an HSDPA 3G+ handset, which allows you to download data on the move at "blistering" near broadband speeds. Ever eager to conserve the WPP shilling, I duly returned the funny red data card I had used previously in my laptop. No point in Martin paying for both, I thought, what with the legal fees and CHI and all.

So I promptly asked the phone chappies here to switch on my data service on my handset, and set off for a week in a phoneless Cambridgeshire cottage. "It's £10 for the first Megabyte and £2 thereafter" Denise had told me as I left. "She must mean Gigabyte", I thought - after all, it can't cost £14 to download a single album track. Can it?

Apparently it can. One week's email in Cambridgeshire later and my phone bill was £1600.

I visited the Vodafone website. It seems I was lucky. Had I gone off for two weeks and to France - as originally planned - and been connected to a "non-Vodafone 3G partner network", I would have run up charges of £14,000. For the same volume of data my home broadband supplier would give me for £25. And which '3' would provide for £10.

Now what really irks me about this is that every month I am asked to attend a mobile advertising conference where lots and lots of extraordinarily bright people (quite a few of them part-paid for by my £1600) talk evangelistically about the great future of mobile - as a source of music, podcasts, rich media, immersive content, infosnacking.... you all know the kind of thing.

As well as being very bright, every attendee at these events has one other thing in common. Not one of them pays their own phone bill. Unsurprising, really, as that immersive user generated Youtube content may be a little less amusing when you're paying Vodafone £25 a pop for it.

People are not unreasonable. Just as with voice calls they will pay a premium for information on the move. But probably not 10,000%. 

So I shall happily attend the next mobile advertising event Vodafone invites me to. But for a speaker's fee of £1,000,000. Plus expenses. 

  

 

 

Published Apr 26 2007, 06:01 PM by Rory Sutherland

Comments

by Will Callaghan
April 27, 2007 10:40 AM
 
Mobile charges generally are complete rip off. I'm on the move most days so switched to a high use tariff - it's just proved to be an excuse to levy a higher standing charge with (still) stupid pence per minute rates for calls. If you could download unlimited data for, say, £25/ month we'd be looking at an explosion of data services. I wonder whether the networks would be able to handle the extra traffic though.
 
 
by Philip Smith
April 27, 2007 12:02 PM
 
It's difficult to see this situation getting any better. The size of the bill that the networks had to pay following the 3G licence auction is so big, that even Rory's generous contribution of £1600 won't have a major impact. £1m for Rory's speaking services? Worth every penny ...
 
 
by John Baker
April 27, 2007 1:15 PM
 
While it isn't often right to take our web experience and apply it to the mobile industry, this one we can. People won't really use the mobile web until it is a "broadband" experience and people won't put up with massive metered data charges. It is a serious pricing challenge but one that needs to occur quickly. The technology is finally there for the mobile web to come into its own if we can sort out the economics. Good relevant advertising anyone?
 
 
by S J Rutledge
April 27, 2007 3:56 PM
 
3G stands for Golly Gosh Gadzooks !
 
 
by Darren Davidson
April 27, 2007 3:56 PM
 
I couldn't agree more with the outrageous prices mobile phone companies charge for 3G services. What irks me just as much are the 3G menus. I occassionaly use mine to keep up to date with fooball results and other sports. When i activate 3G I am taken to a homepage featuring 'soap hunks', 'soap babes', 'games', 'urban tones' etc etc. It's clearly aimed at a teen audience but as I discovered after ringing Vodafone I can't change the home menu. To access Sky Sports which is what I'm after it takes a few minutes. My other gripe are the phone menus which are set up to access 3G services at a touch of a button but if you want to use the alarm (the most commonly used feature on a mobile phone after texting) I have to navigate 5 menus and press various buttons six times to get there. I reckon 3G services will only take off when operators make the content free to surf. Consumers expect the internet to be free and they don't like paying for access via a mobile.
 
 
by Rory Sutherland
April 28, 2007 9:26 AM
 
I entirely concur with this. I am a 41-year old man on the WPP fat corporate bastard tariff, yet Vodafone Live is convinced that I am a hormonally challenged teenager. "Can I see the train times to Sevenoaks, please," I ask. "Yes, but first why not download some Tonez and look at some breasts." It replies. Did they realy pay £16bn for a 3G license so that three hoodies outside a bush shelter in Billericay could play Tetris?
 
 
by Will Callaghan
May 1, 2007 12:31 PM
 
I was an early adopter of 3G and won't be making the same mistake again. There was never any signal - not even a measly 2G - whether walking to work slap bang in the heart of London or sitting in my old house in Bow. I called customer services about it and their advice was to 'stop moving around'. Errr... surely that's the point of mobile?
 
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