PlusOne - Marketing Musings

It seems not that many years ago, when phone calls from mobile phones were short, not just because of the price, but because the handsets were so heavy it was impossible to hold a conversation longer than a few minutes.

While there is much talk of the electronic economy, mostly this is related to the internet (AKA data traffic) and the WWW (AKA ecommerce). But of course there is that other, perhaps more subtle digital economy and that is the mobile economy.

For years we have been hampered by high mobile phone call costs, high mobile data charges and poor profit share from premium SMS services . This has combined to limit mobiles as an integral part of the digital economy.

Mobile data charges need to drop. Mobile internet is about to start growing exponentially (it already accounts for over half of all person’s means of internet access on a global scale) and with it the growth of sales made via handsets.

In the US, access email from iPhones, Blackberry’s and other PDA devices is commonplace. Reason…low data charges.

The cost of mobile calls also restricts greater use of mobiles by business, though almost all are prepared to wear the cost, which for some business who cannot get deals on corporate accounts, can be hefty.

It is interesting to see Dodo Mobile’s recent offer.
For a flat $99 per month, you get free mobile calls to any mobile in Australia. You also get free calls to any land-line in Australia. If you are a text fiend, you also get unlimited txt messages and unlimited MMS messages.

Oh, and you can feel free to check your email and do a bit of mobile web browsing as well because they have also thrown in a quite reasonable 2gb of data as well.

It will be interesting to see how the other providers respond.