One thing I didn't see mentioned here - once carriers start offering unlimited data, it becomes more of a price war that they'd probably want to avoid where one offers it for x, next offers it for x-10, next time it gets lower etc. And over time people are going to start using more and more for the same price. Not an ideal situation for anyone in the market really
PaulBrislen: Meanwhile, Free in France is offering unlimited voice and TXT and a 3GB/month package for EU20.
Interesting times, eh?
so what?
Did you not understand what I wrote?
Given enough demand, you can have all the things listed in the original post at a realistic price. It's happening elsewhere in the world and I'd hope it could come to NZ as well. Voice and TXT should be unlimited - I'll just buy data, thanks.
That's what.
France has 62m population with roughly 67 million mobile subscribers. That is well over ten times the size of the NZ market. France has a population density of 117 people per square km, Nz has a population density of 16 people per square km. So not only is the market itself way bigger, but the populaiton is vastly more concentrated meaning it is vastly cheaper to serve them with a mobile network (and a fixed network for that matter)
In other words, it's totally irrelevant what offers are available in France, (or Germany, or the UK, or pretty much any other country that doesn;t at leats bear passing similarity to NZ) since there are so many differences between the countries that comparisons are utterlymeaningless.
there is an old phrase used when someone makes a point totally irrelevant to the discussion that goes "what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?"
maybe we should change that phrase to "What does that have to do with the price of mobile services in France?"
But is the population density really all that bad in NZ?
"The New Zealand population is highly urbanised. At the 2006 Census, 86 percent of the population was living in an urban area. This includes 72 percent living in main urban areas (population of 30,000 or more), 6 percent living in secondary urban areas (10,000–29,999) and 8 percent living in minor urban areas (1,000–9,999)."
"Main urban areas had a population density of 522.8 people per km2, more than twice that of satellite urban areas, and considerably above the national average of 14.2 people per km2."
I guess that would be useful if phone companies only offerd coverage in urban areas, or if the rban density for NZ was roughly the same as the urban density for France
I couldn't quickly find urban population density for France overall, but Paris population density isaround 21,000 people per sqkm. That is MASSIVELY higher than NZs 522 for urban areas. Aven Auckland (surely our most densly populated city) only has density of 2,700/sqkm, around 1/10th of France's population density (wellington is 890/sqkm)
Why don't you ask Vodafone/Telecom/2Degress or one of the Virtual players? No one here knows the answer. That's not the say everyone here won't speculate to the cows come home though.
Or is this just worry that even though the horse hasn't moved in ages, we should just flog it a bit more to be sure?
I don't think in the USA they offer true unlimited mobile broadband anymore. I think it is often a couple of GB, and then it is crippled to dialup speed.
mattwnz: I don't think in the USA they offer true unlimited mobile broadband anymore. I think it is often a couple of GB, and then it is crippled to dialup speed.
There are still several carriers offering "unlimited" data in US, but they have fine print about fair use policies etc
eXDee: If caps went up and people knew what it meant in terms of real world usage, i think we'd see a greater increase in usage across the board.
But it makes much greater commercial sense to not make this sort of information widely known as the less people actually use of the data they've paid for the greater the profit there is to be made.
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