... and the unlimited story continues

After my latest post about how AT&T and UK mobile operators have changed from the flat fee unlimited tariff model to segmenting users into plans with caps on the usage of data volume, France Telecom has apparently gathered enough courage to sail by the new winds of change, and have announced that the current unlimited plans are unsustainable. This looks to be a clear trend that other market should get prepared to deal with also.

Brazilian operators are estimating that by 2014 the mobile data volumes will be twenty-fold compared to the current level, and as revenue is now likely to follow that trend, either the price erosion on transmission and access technology sould yield equal decline, or the cost for data transmisson will rise.

So to keep the moster on a leash, operators are now taking the step into controlling the data volume with the pricing and segmenting tool. As mentioned in earlier posts this will also ease the Net Neutrality discussion, as operators will now get a charging model for large data volumes resulting from data hungry Internet applications as Youtube and others. Extreme cases showing that data volumes can really go thought the roof was examplified by the Norwegian State Broadcaster, NRK, how offered an nearly 8 hour train trip from Bergen to Olso recorded in HD as a BitTorrent download of 246 gigabytes! Even your HSPA+ wireless broadband modem will have a hardtime with this. The claimes are the tens of thousands of users have done the download.