Consumers Disinterested In Mobile Broadband

Parks Associates has released some results of a survey into the premium consumers are willing to pay for mobile broadband — and it’s not pretty. The survey found that only five out of the 12 countries in the survey were willing to pay more for mobile broadband than they were currently paying for their internet. I don’t know how the question was worded, but mobile broadband was defined as “a wireless high-speed service with which users can access the Internet wirelessly at home and in other locations”, and since in most countries consumers were willing to pay less than they are currently paying it demonstrates a distinct lack of faith in the quality of mobile broadband. That being said, Japan and Korea were the countries willing to pay the least for mobile broadband, and they’ve got relatively high penetration. Only people in the UK are willing to pay a significant premium, with an average premium of 28 percent.
“The report finds that at $35 a month, a rate much lower than the prevailing price offered by major mobile carriers, only 19 percent of U.S. Internet users are interested in adopting a mobile broadband service. At this price point, the total worldwide addressable market is less than 100 million subscribers.” Which isn’t that much of an issue since few of the current 3G networks could handle a significant number of people on there using data equivalent to their home networks, which could change as technology improves. Parks Associates claims that “mobile carriers need to provide application-centric rather than access-centric mobile broadband services and offer a variety of flexible business models that fit consumers’ usage patterns,” which some of them are already doing. (release via Mobile Technology)

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