With wireless towers on every hilltop (except when you really,
really need mobile reception) it's tempting to take the next step in telecommunications and chuck away the landline altogether. Someone was recently telling me that he's done just that: he's cancelled a slow DSL broadband plan and replaced it with a wireless plan that's cheaper and faster. His landline phone has already gone.
The catch: he lives in Melbourne. City dwellers have some genuine competition to choose from when shopping for wireless plans. Those of us in the country only have one serious option, and that option charges like the proverbial wounded bull. Telstra can rightly claim one of the world's largest and most sophisticated mobile networks, but it asks a hefty ransom for the privilege of using it.
I'm in a data-intensive business. I often use 200 MB of data a day, occasionally three times that. A software update can be 400 MB alone.
The Telstra mobile data plan that's nearest in cost to my current DSL landline plan would give me 1 gigabyte of data a month - about a week's worth of data on my current usage. For the remaining three weeks, I'd be paying 15 cents per megabyte in excess usage fees. Tack on another $200.
I could pay Telstra $109.95 for their 3GB plan, but it still doesn't carry me through a typical month of data usage.
Alternatively, I could wander over to Optus, the only other plausible carrier if you're in the bush, and buy a 6 GB plan for $59.99 - or $49.99 if I bundle the data plan with a phone plan. That's a plan that would make me seriously consider untethering myself from landlines.
Sadly, Optus hasn't got towers in some of the out-of-the-way places where I need mobile reception. It might cover 96% or 98% of the population, as it claims, but in that missing few percent is a lot of country where I live and work. Telstra does cover these areas. Mostly.
When Telstra was putting up its Next G network, a lot of stress was laid on its data capabilities. Rightfully so - by the end of next year, Next G should be rocketing along a maxium speeds of 28.8 megabits per second, versus the already-fast 8.0 mb/sec that my DSL connection provides. When revellers see out 2010, Next G should be operating at up to 42mb/sec. Having people like myself on this network, sending megabytes coursing through the ether and paying for the privilege, is what Next G is all about.
So why has Telstra erected a tariff barrier to Next G adoption?
Some writers, enraged at Telstra's pricing for the iPhone released a fortnight ago, say it's due to the company's arrogance. Admittedly, some of Telstra's management, particularly its amigos, don't come across as being men of deep humility. But "arrogant pricing"? No, it's a hard-headed corporation charging what it thinks the customer will bear.
In one sense, Telstra has it right. I'm prepared to pay a (modest) premium for Telstra's peerless network coverage. In fact, I don't have really have an option. If I want to work wirelessly across the length and breadth of this wide brown land, I have to sign up with Telstra.
But I won't hitch up while Telstra is punishing me for even modest data usage. I don't think I'm alone, and this makes Telstra's approach puzzling.
The iPhone, for instance, is a device that makes mobile internet usage as easy as from a desktop computer, and more fun. If Telstra want to get people hooked on wireless data, the iPhone is the perfect opportunity. Had Telstra provided pricing plans aimed at volume sales and throughput, as opposed to extracting a premium, the Next G network may have gained another few hundred thousand data users overnight. And maybe it did - but I'll take a hint from one tech writer who looked at the queues of people looking to register their iPhones on launch day. In this particular store, Telstra and Vodaphone had about five people each in their queues; Optus had 200.
There's something else - besides arrogance and its superior network - that might make Telstra push the pain barrier with wireless data pricing: changing expectations. Who would have guessed a decade ago that not only adults, but children would come to see a mobile phone as a necessary accessory? (My child included - unfortunately for her, her numerous good, sound arguments for a mobile have fallen on deaf ears.)
It won't be another decade, or even another half-decade, before we all expect our mobiles to serve full duty as internet/email devices, too. As we shift to that concept, our perceptions of value in wireless plans will shift as well.
Presumably, Telstra is positioning itself for that shift - and yet its parsimonious allocation of data in its plans is a big disincentive against adopting wireless broadband.
As a tech-friendly hardcore data user (no, not that sort of hardcore), I should be one of Telstra's most likely wireless data customers. But whichever way I look at the plans, I can't make a good financial case for abandoning my landline connections. And I'm an easy market: what about all those mobile users out there seen poking at their mobile in disgust and muttering "all I want to do is make a bloody phone call"?
The user-friendly iPhone and its spin-offs have the potential to change how we think about mobile communication, and to get more people driving the Next G data freeway. But first, Telstra has to price its network as though it is a multi-lane freeway - not as if it's a back road liable to fall to pieces under heavy traffic.
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