The Wrong Business Model For Wireless Data: Charging Per Byte
It appears that yet another wireless data service provider has gone down the wrong path and decided that the best way to charge for their service is set a price per byte of usage. At first, this sounds reasonable, since the bigger users end up paying more. However, the only one who this is advantageous to is the company providing the service. It’s not consumer friendly at all – and actually discourages adoption and usage of their offering. Furthermore, almost no one online thinks about their surfing activities in terms of data usage. If someone happens to send you a large data file in an email, that could break the bank for your internet service bill. I almost had to laugh when I read that the firm pitching this payment scheme is saying it: “may be used for streaming media, video conferencing, security cameras, online gaming, Internet telephony, server hosting, and remote control.” These are all bandwidth intensive operations. Who, in their right mind, would sign up to pay per byte for such applications?
