State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Here are excerpts from a recent article which expressed concerns about mobile data pricing going from a simple fixed price (as offered to iPhone users in the US currently) to a more elaborate usage-based model. As an example, iPhone users get all you can use data plan for $30 which is competitive. I recently ran a poll on data usage and its results showed that many smartphone users in Pakistan consume over 100MB data each month.

Consider: A single YouTube viewing consumes nearly 100 times as much cellular bandwidth as a voice call. In Asia, some 200 million people already watch video on their smartphones. No wonder Google (whose YouTube unit serves up one billion videos a day) is an investor in a new undersea fiber line connecting North America to the Far East.

More omens: Data collector AdMob reports that mobile Web page requests grew 9% from July to August—a 180% annual growth rate. And Motorola recently went public with worries that a handful of mobile Slingbox users (a video streaming device) could wipe out cell service in a whole neighborhood.

This is a mobile meltdown in the making.

It’s also why we persist in suspecting that the biggest political scrum in the near future won’t be over classic net neutrality at all—it will be a battle over usage-based pricing, which is one of the few ways to keep excessive demand in check (though key help will also come from technologies that opportunistically dump wireless traffic back into the fixed Net).

John Stratton, Verizon Wireless’s marketing chief, recently assured an interviewer that the mobile net would be open to all kinds of devices and uses. But he also predicted “a higher emphasis on usage-based billing, where if you consume more of the network, you pay more.”

The same message comes from Fergus O’Reilly of High Deal, a company that makes billing software for network operators: “The flat-rate model we had for broadband is no longer tenable.”

This may be a bigger deal than it seems, because usage-based pricing could potentially pull the rug out from under the business models of Google and other Web powers, whose services now appear “free” to customers. Imagine if broadcast TV had charged by the minute. Your dad would have turned off the set during the commercials.

Think about it. Mobile browsing could quickly become a very different experience for users, and require an entirely new approach by Web businesses. After all, flat-rate pricing inspired customers to sample the Web and its services a lot more freely than they otherwise would. Still, the resistance of Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others to usage pricing may be futile unless they’re willing themselves to subsidize delivery of their services to mobile consumers—which would turn net neut precisely on its head.