Thursday, September 26, 2013

Bayonette (Norway) abandons the artificial scarcity model for broadband

We have written about artificial scarcity in the broadband market before and are happy to see an operator addressing the issue quite so literally - Norway's Bayonette:

"Networks make a lot of money by selling stepped internet connections. We think differently, and don't want to milk customers by offering different service levels that are only marginally cheaper to produce."

What needs to be added here is that a lot can be saved on costs, if an operator abolishes throttling ('stepped connections'). The number of propositions goes down dramatically (to one), with obvious implications for sales & marketing, as well as billing.

Bayonette's offerings is much like Google Fiber's: 1 Gb/s for 500 NOK/mo and there is a free service (3/1 Mb/s).

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Telecoms: it's all marketing

It always surprises me how telecoms companies get away with funny statements.
  • "We want to end handset subsidies". There is no such thing as subsidies. You always pay through your monthly bill, that you are tied to for 12 or 24 months.
  • "Changing consumer behaviour". Consumers don't change, telco managers sleep. Yes, consumers stop using SMS and migrate to chat/messaging/IM apps that offer infinitely more features. But it's still texting what they do.
  • "Most mobile subscribers need less than 1 GB of data per month". High pricing has forced us to use free WiFi whenever we can, but 1 GB really is NOTHING, even on a smartphone. Let alone on a tablet.