Mobile Data Can Bankrupt You

Om Malik | Monday, September 13, 2004 | 3:58 PM PT | 0 comments

Lots of talk about downloading music over the air to your cell phones, and perhaps time for a little reality check, especially if you live outside of North America. If you download one 4 megabyte MP3 song over the air using a GPRS plan - and i am talking about purely in data size and not in minutes of use - it will cost you about $72 in Western Europe. And this is despite a 13% decline in pay-per-use GPRS prices since May 2003. Strategy Analytics director, Phil Taylor, notes “With over 85 percent of GPRS users on pay-per-use plans, operators need to find ways of making data services more affordable to the mass market.” A Strategy Analytics study points out that carriers are beginning to recognize this pricing problem and trying to come-up with more simple plans. In this aspect, one had to give respect to T-Mobile.

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