The Children Are Our Future
Consumer wireless data has become synomounous with the youth market due to the runaway popularity of SMS. To date most so called “data revenue” is actually SMS based and has very little to do with WAP, 1X, GPRS, 3G or MMS. As a result carriers have focused more and more of their consumer data services towards games and entertainment in the hope of luring more youth dollars. Kids are a huge market but ultimately are still beholden to their parents willingness and ability to subsidize their wireless spending. And this is where wireless carriers are betting too much on them. Carriers have unrealistic expectations of how much money they can extract from today’s kids. Carriers need to lay a data foundation with this market through affordable pricing and prepay. These connected kids will drive demand for more sophisticated services as they enter the workforce and their incomes increase. Think about how email and the web went mainstream once we had a generation of students who couldn’t imagine a computer without internet access. The same will happen with wireless data. Until then consumer data will be limited to ringtones and SMS.
