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Business News Digital
High data transfer fees will hinder growth of mobile content market
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 19 December 2008
Mobile transaction company mBlox say that UK mobile users who access mobile downloads where the data charge is not bundled into the download fee could pay up to £10 in order to get the content onto their mobile, because pay-as-you-go mobile data transfer fees are still so high.
That off-puttingly large fee does not apply to download services operated by the mobile networks, because they will bundle the cost for transferring data over the mobile internet in with the cost of the track.
Mobile internet users with large amounts of data transfer capacity bundled into their monthly subscription fees are also unlikely to be effected. But if you’re accessing content from independent (ie non-network operated) mobile download platforms with pay as you go data transfer then you could find a music track increases in cost ten-fold once data charges are taken into account.
mBlox say that the UK mobile networks have some of the highest pay as you go data charges, charging up to five pounds a MB, meaning a 2MB music file would cost £10 to download. Data charges elsewhere in Europe are much more reasonably priced, especially in Germany where many operators charge just 24 euro-cents a megabyte.
mBlox say that if the mobile content market is really going to take off in 2009 then mobile companies need to make data-transfer fees less steep and more transparent. To achieve the latter they’d need to adopt a ‘sender-pays’ model, where independent content services pay the mobile network directly for the data costs of delivering content, and bundle that cost into the download price, meaning the user pays what they see.
mBlox Chairman Andrew Bud told reporters: “2009 could be a pivotal year for rich mobile content, but for this to happen, consumers need a transparent pricing mechanism to purchase rich content. Content providers need to be sure that their consumers are treated fairly,” said Andrew Bud, executive chairman, mBlox. The current hope that flat-rate data will be the total solution is fundamentally flawed as market penetration is not high enough nor is it likely to be for some considerable time”.
