Posts Tagged “contract”
Jun
23
2010
 
ZTE signs PON equipment contract with China TelecomPosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News
ZTE Corporation, a provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions, has won a passive optical network, or PON equipment contract from China Telecom, a telecommunications and broadband operator, valued at over CNY1 billion. Read Full Story…
Jun
23
2010
Compare iPhone 4 deals onlinePosted by CompareMobiles.com in Mobile News, New Deals, New MobilesNew Mobile & Latest Deal News!
T-Mobile and 3 have yet to reveal their pricing and we’ve heard from a reliable source that there could be some cheaper options for business users and self-employed within the next couple of weeks. But for now, let’s take a look at the initial offers from Vodafone and Orange, which will be available to buy online tomorrow, and O2’s deals which will only be available to buy in-store. iPhone 4 16GB – To buy the handset for just £29 all three networks are offering 1200 minutes for £45pm on a 24-month contract. Here the similarities end though with Vodafone offering 1GB of Internet/Web mail per month, 1GB of Wi-Fi usage with BT Openzone and 5MB of European roaming data usage per day. Orange has offered ‘unlimited’ mobile Internet and Wi-Fi with BT Openzone with a fair usage policy of 750MB per month. Unlimited access to The Cloud and BT Openzone Wi-Fi (fair usage policy in force) is provided by O2 along with 750MB of data usage. For those wishing to keep the monthly line rental to a minimum, O2 and Vodafone offer £25pm rentals with the iPhone available at £279/£219 respectively and Orange offer a rental at £30pm with a fantastic price of only £169 for the handset. The same data offers apply as above but with O2 lowering their data usage 500MB per month and Vodafone removing their free European roaming data. iPhone 4 32GB – Things get a little shaken up here so those who desire the high-end memory iPhone 4 can really take advantage of the networks different takes on what the user may want. Vodafone and Orange tempt those who want a low handset cost with Orange pricing the iPhone at £29 with unlimited minutes, data and Wi-Fi for £75pm whilst Vodafone costs the handset at £59 with 3000 minutes, 1GB of data, 1GB of Wi-Fi and include their 5MB daily European roaming promotion. Lower monthly line rentals see the handset costs ballooning up to £300+ but O2 provide some nice middle ground. Its £45pm/1200 free minutes and 750MB of data plan have the iPhone priced at £129 with unlimited access to The Cloud and BT Openzone. iPhone 3GS 8GB – The release of the iPhone 4 opens up an attractive set of offers here for the new 8GB release of the iPhone 3GS. Provided free of charge across all three networks with 600 free minutes at £35pm the iPhone 3GS becomes a tempting, low cost offer. Various amounts of data and Wi-Fi usage are on offer to ensure the best of the iPhones features can be enjoyed without the threat of large bills arriving through the letter box. A full set of 18 month contracts are also available with Vodafone providing the handsets at the same cost but with an additional £5pm added to the rental. Orange has taken the opposite route with the line rental remaining the same but with a significant increase in the iPhones cost. We think the networks should be praised for being brave enough to take a range of different approaches to the device and line rental costs as this has ensured that you, the user, can get the very best deal tailored to your own needs.
Compare iPhone 4 16GB deals
Tags: 12, 3, 3gs, all, best, cheaper, compare, contract, deal, Deals, free, iphone, iphone 3gs, latest, latest deal, line, mobile, networks, new, new mobile, o2, orange, phone, phones, rental, roaming, sam, sim, t-mobile, tariff, tariffs, test, three, vodafone |
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Pay-as-you-go customers may have limited options when the iPhone 4 goes on
sale on 24 June, after it emerged that Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U will
offer the device only to contract customers for the foreseeable future.
Read Full Story…
(Source Yahoo UK News)
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Sending mobile data over your broadband with paid-for femtocell will count against monthly tariff
Vodafone has a nasty shock in store for would-be users of its “femtocell”, which boosts patchy mobile signals indoors by sending the voice and data signal over the customer’s home broadband. Any mobile data sent over the home broadband connection will still be charged against customers’ monthly usage, the company has told the Guardian.
Outlining plans for future deployment, Vodafone senior marketing manager Lee McDougall said Vodafone is confident that consumer uptake of femtocells will be high. However he declined to give figures for sales since the launch in July 2009, or to say what increase in mobile use had been seen by femtocell users.
Femtocells – whose name comes from the prefix “femto”, meaning one millionth of a billionth – are designed to improve mobile network coverage by plugging into a home broadband network and providing a 3G connection to attached phones.
Vodafone remains the only UK mobile operator in the UK to offer femtocells, through two different price plans. The current range – dubbed Sure Signal boxes – are retailing at £50 for existing customers on contracts over £25 per month, or £120 – £5 per month for two years – for those on smaller contracts or pay-as-you-go contracts.
But though femtocells effectively relieve load on the mobile network, and send them via the broadband paid for by the customer, any minutes used calling via the femtocell will be taken from a customers monthly allowance, despite having already paid for the bandwidth in the original package. And mobile data sent via Sure Signal – and through the customer’s broadband – will count against the data tariff for the contract as though the customer were outside using a mobile mast.
In Japan, mobile corporation SoftBank offers free femtocell packages to existing customers. Asked why Vodafone would not be following its lead, McDougall said: “Different markets have different drivers. We know we’ve got a competitive product.”
At a time when data traffic is doubling every four months, according to O2, femtocells are an inexpensive solution to rapidly growing demand. Data transfers over femtocell are also far less expensive to the network operator than other means, as Dave Nowicki of mobile technology firm Airvana confirmed. “The marginal cost of delivery per gigabyte is much lower,” he said. “Femtocells are complementary to Wi-Fi.”
The Advertising Standards Authority last week upheld four complaints from rival mobile operators who said that advertising for the product was “misleading”.
Vodafone’s poster campaign pictured a man leaning out of his apartment window, apparently struggling to get a mobile signal, headed: “Only Vodafone can guarantee mobile signal in your home.”
The most pointed complaint came from rival mobile operator O2 which said Vodafone did not make clear users would have to pay additional costs for a femtocell device. On this, the ASA said it was reasonable for people to infer that a guaranteed signal was part of the original mobile package – but because this was not the case, the advertisement was likely to mislead.
McDougall told the Guardian the campaign would be modified to take into account the ASA ruling, maintaining that Vodafone Sure Start boxes would not be a hard sell to would-be customers.
“Customers have told us the product is lifechanging for them,” McDougall told the Guardian. “They said it had made a significant difference to their life. The more they hear about them the more they’re interested.”
Although he said he couldn’t put a figure on it, internal reports showed a higher-than-predicted uplift in data usage for customers trialling the Sure Signal boxes.
“Feedback from an 8m-leaflet door drop indicated that 90% of potential customers were willing to pay up front; unsurprisingly the desire to boost mobile signal was the biggest driver,” he said.
In the US, AT&T is taking the same approach to mobile data sent through femtocells as Vodafone, and counting it against the customer’s bill. AT&T argues that it is costly to install the systems at ISPs which will collect the voice and mobile data being sent by broadband and route it through its own network.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Ofcom aims to cut £800m off UK’s annual mobile bill but networks say proposals will force millions to give up their phones
Millions of British mobile phone users who rely on their handsets to keep them in touch with family but only use them in emergencies could be cut off – because of plans by the telecoms and media watchdog that are supposed to bring down the cost of making calls.
Ofcom will Wednesday end a 12-week consultation on its plans to slash the cost of calling a mobile phone. But the industry has warned that the likely shake-up will lead to the reintroduction of controversial “expiry dates” on prepay top-ups.
The mobile network O2 is understood to have warned the regulator that its proposals are “irresponsible” and could force millions of people on low incomes to abandon their phones.
Orange has already branded the plans as “a backward step”, while Vodafone has claimed that the proposals, outlined in April, could see the end of mobile handset subsidies. As a result, consumers would have to pay for new handsets when they sign up or renew a long-term contract.
Ofcom hopes to save consumers and businesses almost £800m a year from 2015 by reducing co-called mobile termination rates – the price networks charge each other and fixed-line companies such as BT to connect calls – from 4.3p a minute today to just 0.5p by 2015.
BT, which last year teamed up with the UK’s smallest network, 3, to fight the charges, has argued that mobile termination rates are an unjustifiable subsidy for the mobile phone industry. But the mobile phone companies argue that they use these charges to subsidise a service to lower-income customers.
More than half the UK’s mobile phone users have a pay-as-you-go phone, and many of these have handsets only so that friends and relatives can call them. They only make calls themselves in emergencies but the incoming calls generate enough revenues, through termination rates, to make them viable customers for the mobile phone companies. Under Ofcom’s plans, however, it would cease to be economic to provide many infrequent callers with a mobile phone.
In its 155-page consultation document, which comes with 234 pages of annexes, the regulator argues that the networks should only be able to recoup the actual cost of carrying other people’s calls and should look to other ways of generating revenues to cover their other costs. Ofcom suggests the mobile phone companies could impose “minimum monthly spending commitments” on pre-pay users to recoup their costs.
O2, which has 11.5 million pre-pay customers, argues in its submission to Ofcom that this risks a return to the days when pre-pay mobile phone users saw their credit expire after a set period, whether they had used it or not.
When pre-pay services first appeared in the UK more than a decade ago, many companies issued top-up vouchers that had a “use it or lose it” expiry date. After a wave of consumer protests about what came to be known as “the ‘ouch’ in ‘voucher’”, they dumped these time limits. The four main networks now count as “active” any user who has made or received a call within the previous three months, and there is no expiry date on pre-pay top-ups.
Ofcom’s proposals, O2 argues, would see time limits reintroduced. O2 estimates that millions of pre-pay customers do not regularly top up their phones, only making calls in emergencies. These customers would be forced to waste money topping up phones or risk being disconnected.
The fight over the scheme for termination rates that will take over in 2011 has already lasted over a year and is likely to be acrimonious. When the current caps were imposed, the mobile phone companies launched a protracted legal fight that involved the Competition Commission and Competition Appeals Tribunal.
Ofcom says it must reduce mobile termination rates to comply with EU guidelines. The networks, however, believe the regulator is trying to grab headlines to curry favour with the coalition government. Before the election, Conservative politicians made it clear that they wanted to reduce the regulator’s powers.
Separately, O2, Orange and Vodafone will announce tomorrow that they have teamed up to test a new TV broadcast service that could offer British mobile phone users the chance to watch a host of channels on their handsets.
The three companies, which together control the bulk of the UK mobile phone market, are testing technology that would enable them to provide broadcast television over the existing 3G mobile phone spectrum without clogging up their networks, which are increasingly being used by smartphone users to access the web and send emails.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Having lost its exclusive rights to sell Apple’s new phone, the mobile network now seems to have an inverse pricing at its low end to discourage 24-month contracts
O2 has announced the pricing for its iPhone 4 handsets – and seems to be trying to push people away from buying longer-term contracts.
Under the 24-month contracts, the phones are more expensive than the 18-month contracts, by between £70 (for the white 16GB version priced at £209 for 18 months, or £279 for 24 months) and £24 (for the black 32GB version, costing £299 for 18 months and £323 for 24 months). Even though the price plans at that tariff differ by £5 per month, over 18 months the 16GB handset works out cheaper on the lowest tariff by £10.
Pricing plans for Vodafone’s iPhone 4 leaked out earlier this week, although the company has not formally announced them and is only letting people indicate interest in ordering it.
Orange’s charges start at £169 for a 16GB phone on a £30-per month 24-month contract (£229 on £30 for 18 months)
O2′s pricing decision has puzzled people on Twitter: “O2 seems to have forgotten the idea is to lure people onto longer contract by *lowering* upfront costs. Duh.,” commented journalist Scott Colvey.
The decision – tied to O2′s decision to introduce strict caps on data downloads per month, varying between 500MB and 1GB, replacing its previous “unlimited” data contracts that many are still using – may mean a migration of former iPhone customers away from the company, which until last Christmas had the monopoly on iPhone sales in the UK. Now the phone is sold by Orange, Vodafone and 3 – though only Orange and Vodafone have announced prices.
Many iPhone owners who bought the second-generation iPhone in 2008 on 18- or 24-month contracts will be eligible to upgrade with O2 – or possibly to shift to another carrier.
Apple has apologised to would-be customers after overwhelming demand meant that its own and AT&T’s servers crashed when the phone went on sale in five countries on Tuesday. It says that 600,000 phones were ordered on the day – which suggests that it has tapped into huge pent-up demand from owners of older versions, as well as new buyers seeking to join the smartphone bandwagon.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Apple sees sales of 600,000 units on Tuesday, with demand in Germany 10 times ahead of that for last year’s model
Apple has reported overwhelming demand for its new iPhone 4 model, selling more than 600,000 in a single day on Tuesday which saw ordering websites crash in the US and UK.
In Germany, demand for the new model, which was only unveiled by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs at the start of the month, is running 10 times ahead of that for last year’s model, the iPhone 3GS, reported Deutsche Telekom.
By comparison, when the iPhone 3GS went on sale last year, 1m were sold in its first three days. But that debuted in eight countries, whereas the iPhone 4 has gone on sale only in five.
Apple has apologised to people who tried to order the phone and gave up in frustration, saying demand was far higher than it expected. “We hope that they will try again.. once the iPhone 4 is in stock.”
Since its debut in June 2007, Apple’s smartphone has taken a huge chunk of the smartphone market and forced companies such as RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, and Nokia, which has the lion’s share of smartphone sales, to play catchup. Nokia issued another profits warning on Wednesday, and its share of the smartphone market is falling every quarter.
In the UK, where Apple is offering the phone without a contract through its online store, Apple’s website crashed as people tried to order it. And in the US, where it is only available with a contract from AT&T, the telephone company’s website froze as it tried to cope with an avalanche of orders each of which had to be verified on its own servers. That also led to problems in which some customers saw details of other peoples’ accounts – a reminder of the flaw exposed by a security group last week in which hundreds of thousands of Apple iPad users’ emails were stolen via weak security on AT&T’s site.
As a result of the heavy demand Apple has had to push back the delivery date for phones ordered online, and on Wednesday AT&T suspended orders, citing “unexpectedly high demand”.
Apple said “it was the largest number of pre-orders Apple has ever taken in a single day and was far higher than we anticipated, resulting in many order and approval system malfunctions.”
Last year in the UK O2 had exclusive rights to sell the new iPhone, and said then that more of those handsets were sold in the first two hours of trading than all handsets in an average day.
This year Apple is selling the iPhone 4 without a contract – at £499 for the cheapest version – and O2, Vodafone, Orange and 3 are competing to offer it on contract terms. However neither O2 or 3 have yet announced prices, or allowed customers to pre-order the phone.
However the new contracts being offered for the phones have sparked anger among web users, who say that the carriers’ use of the word “unlimited” for the amount of data that can be downloaded through the smartphone is misleading. The companies impose a “fair use” cap, while describing the service as “unlimited”.
Now, a formal review by the advertising regulator could be about to put a cap on the practice.
This could mean that fixed-line and mobile operators will not be able to use the term “unlimited broadband” unless they are offering a genuinely unlimited service – and that means nothing in the small print that lets the provider send warnings to customers if they reach a certain threshold.
The review is being led by the Advertising Standards Authority, reports New Media Age, which will work with two ad industry bodies to make a comprehensive assessment of industry claims and consumer complaints on both broadband speeds and “unlimited” tariff penalties.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Orange has announced its
iPhone
4 pricing plans for pay-as-you-go, monthly and businesses customers,
revealing that contract customers will have to pay a whopping £75 a month for 24
months to get the device for free.
Read Full Story…
(Source Yahoo UK News)
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Only a tiny number of people use huge amounts of data – which means that many more have seen ‘unlimited’ contracts killed off. It’s a tragedy of the commons for mobile data
So the free lunch – otherwise known as the unlimited data tariff – is over. O2 said on Thursday that it will no longer be offering new or upgrading customers its “unlimited” tariff for smartphone users – principally, it’s believed, the iPhone users, whose numbers connected to O2 have grown from 1m to 2m in a year.
O2 isn’t the first: Vodafone ended its “unlimited” offering last month, and Steve Jobs had barely sat down after delivering his WWDC speech before AT&T announced that it too was ending its “unlimited” offering, replacing it with a tiered set – $15/month for 200MB, $25/month for 2GB. Orange is expected to follow suit in the next few weeks, though when asked the company simply says that it “constantly reviews its pricing”. However the noises we’re hearing from parts of the company suggest that a review will see it follow O2 to dump the “unlimited” offering.
Why? Because a tiny number of users are slurping huge amounts of data. And because the mass of users are demanding more and more data (though lots less than the real slurpers). There’s all sorts of interesting information that we can pull out of this – especially with the help of O2′s chief executive Ronan Dunne, who signed a lengthy post at the company’s blog with a tortuous justification for why the company has changed its rules. The strange thing is why he hasn’t come out with the simple reason – because it would make O2 a lot more popular at a stroke.
He goes over the points that were made in yesterday – that 97% of O2 smartphone users use less than 500MB, and that only a tiny number use more than 1GB. (Interesting to note that Apple-watcher John Gruber, someone who I’d expect to be a heavy user, says he uses about 500MB per month. So he’s clearly just one of the 97%, even if an outlier there.) Even so, smartphone users are a problem:
“one streamed YouTube video has the same effect on the network as half a million text messages sent simultaneously, the equivalent of everybody in Newcastle sending a text at once.”
Well, yes, but nobody made you offer the iPhone, Mr Dunne. You were the ones who wanted it so much. This makes it sound as though you like getting peoples’ money, but don’t like offering them a concomitant service to go with it.
However it’s more complicated than O2 getting a bit whiney. What we’re hearing here at the Guardian though is that Apple itself helped to kill off the “unlimited” tag, because it doesn’t like it being used with services that call it “unlimited*” and then explain further down the page in tiny print that that actually * means “subject to ‘fair usage’”. (We understand that Apple vetoed Vodafone’s initial pricing for the iPad data plans for just that reason.) It seems that just as broadband ISPs became addicted, when the race to sign up customers was on a few years ago, to the phrase “up to…” for their line speeds, so mobile data networks have gotten too comfy with the “unlimited*” word – where the asterisk is all-important. You could even call it Unlimited™ – which has quite a different meaning from unlimited.
Apple’s weight isn’t the real reason for the change, though. Stay with us.
There’s other interesting stuff in that blogpost: O2 says there that the average user uses 200MB per month; that FaceTime, the video calling offering introduced by Apple with the iPhone 4, will only be available on Wi-Fi (at least from O2); and there will be regular texts to let you know how you’re doing on your data allowance. And if you go over it without buying more, you’ll see your data speed slow down.
Given those numbers, let’s make some assumptions. There are 2m iPhone users (and even more if you add in Android users). That’s a large enough population that you can treat it as a random sample. I’m told by one of the networks that data use follows the normal distribution (aka the bell curve – that mathematical prediction of where the members of a random population will be: it applies for things like height, for example). It’s probably not a perfect normal distribution – there will be a low-end cutoff, because any device connected to the network will use a least a little data. But for modelling, it’s a start.
So: 200MB average; 97% use less than 500MB. Plus those numbers into a normal distribution calculator and you discover that those 0.1% who are annoying O2 so much consume more than 690MB of data per month. That’s about 23MB per day – roughly a megabyte every single hour. What, you think, are those folks doing? In fact, one network tells me that those people are downloading many gigabytes per month. That’s quite hard to do on a smartphone.
Is it because of music streaming services like Spotify or We7 or (in the US) Pandora? The networks say no: audio doesn’t take up that much bandwidth (certainly compared to video), and they haven’t seen much takeup. So those gigabyte users aren’t listening to streams. (The iPlayer is only available via Wi-Fi on most networks.) Yet O2 says that while it has doubled the number of iPhone users, mobile data use is doubling every 4 months, equivalent to an eightfold growth every year.
So: lots of growth, but some real extremes. What is causing it? Closer investigation suggests that this is a sort of collateral damage from the rumblings that preceded the Digital Economy Act – that it’s caused by peer-to-peer users who were perhaps worried about the “three strikes” talk, and figured that their landlines (if they have them) might be monitored or throttled if they download a lot of P2P data; or they might be surcharged. For as we’ve pointed out before, “unlimited” doesn’t mean unlimited on landline broadband.
So those wary folk – put by one network as numbering “in the few hundreds” out of millions – have signed up on “unlimited” plans, taken the SIM out of the phone, and then use it in a 3G dongle to download stuff. Because it’s unlimited, they can get what they want. And as they don’t mind how quickly it arrives, the speed isn’t a particular issue; they’re just after volume. O2 says that 0.1% of its smartphone users – that’s about 2,000 people – are consuming 36% of its data. Other networks indicate the same.
It’s also a bit foolish on the part of the downloaders, because the Digital Economy Act does actually allow for measures to be taken over illicit filesharing over mobile networks. But possibly the people doing it don’t think they’ll be noticed.
Here’s news: the mobile networks have noticed.
So it’s not really down to the iPhone or Android phones, which are more of an annoyance to the networks, because they make multiple, frequent requests to the network – but those are small amounts; those aren’t the reason why O2 is ending the unlimited package. It’s because some people took it at its word when it said data access was unlimited.
At this point, your – and our – reaction is “so tell that 0.1% to stop being data hogs – shape their bandwidth, send them letters, that sort of thing. Because obviously you’re not going to want to burden yourself with having to set up new billing for millions of customers just because you’ve got 0.1% who are a bit annoying. No, that would be silly.”
It’s certainly puzzling that O2 isn’t being clearer about the reasons. But the networks say they don’t want to annoy those big downloaders. That’s because they want to keep them as customers; but as paying customers. Yet the unlimited contracts aren’t being withdrawn; they’ll simply not be renewed. “At some stage, people will want a new handset or a new contract,” an O2 spokesperson said yesterday.
I wouldn’t be so sure: someone who’s using their iPhone SIM as a dongle really isn’t worried about upgrading; they’ve probably got a PAYG SIM stuffed into their iPhone for their phone calls. They’re not stupid. Unless O2 – and the other networks – start taking some aggressive action, such as throttling their connections, then the faux-iPhoners will carry on. It’s a tragedy of the commons, mobile data-style. Just like spam and comment bots, the tiny number of P2P mobile downloaders are screwing it up for everyone else.
It’s odd that internet evolution is going in reverse here: I thought that ISPs had learnt that offering broadband was far better for retaining customers than the penny-per-minute dialup nightmare of 1990s internet connectivity (yes, children, we used to have dialup modems, and paid per minute we were connected. And you couldn’t use make a phone call while you did).
It’s a retrograde move – and even though the networks insist that most people won’t be affected, the fact is that we’re data-hungry. Eventually, we’ll all be over the limit. Will the P2P donglers still be on their unlimited contracts even then? One feels that it’s time for the networks, if they’re really serious about offering a good service to all their customers, to have a think about that “fair use” clause.
Meanwhile, the 97% get a little inconvenienced, plus the constant worry that they’ll go over their limit. That’s actually the worst thing about what’s happening here: that the confidence that you can use the mobile internet anywhere is suddenly gone, replaced by a nagging worry that this page or that service will land you with a big bill. The mobile internet shouldn’t be like that: it should be like the landline version, where you don’t worry about the megabytes. It’s not a free lunch – but it’s not a system where the person in front is treating the buffet as an all-you-can-eat either.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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Foxconn – the massive Taiwan-based contract manufacturer whose clients include Apple, Dell, HP, Intel, Sony, and others – will shutter its mainland China operations in a restructuring that could move as many as 800,000 workers into the ranks of the unemployed.…
Free White Paper – Data quality and cost reduction
Read Full Story…
(Source The Register)
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Network operator says that most customers will see no difference – but that 1% of users consume 36% of data
O2 is telling its smartphone customers – notably including users of Apple’s iPhone – that it is ending its “unlimited” data plans, and that those who use a lot of data will have to pay up in time.
Unveiling its new data tariffs ahead of the launch of the iPhone 4 on 24 June, the mobile operator insisted that 97% of users will not notice the difference – and that its changes were really aimed at about 2,000 users who use extraordinarily high amounts of data every month.
Instead, it said that a tiny number – just 1% of smartphone users – are using 36% of its total mobile data traffic, and that they needed to be encouraged to change their behaviour.
The new tariffs replace the “unlimited” data tariffs offered with the iPhone on O2 in 2007 with a new tiered set, including 500MB, 750MB and 1GB data packages, along with unlimited Wi-Fi time via The Cloud and BT’s OpenZone services. However existing users with iPhone contracts will still be able to use “unlimited” amounts of data, O2 said.
“97% of our smartphone users use less than 500MB per month, so they won’t notice a difference,” said a spokeswoman for O2. Existing O2 customers can find out their data consumption on the O2 site.
She said that O2 was seeing dramatic growth in the number of smartphone users, especially iPhone users, but even more rapid growth in mobile data usage. “Total mobile data consumption on our network is doubling every four months,” she said. “And the number of iPhone users on O2 has grown in a year from 1m to 2m.”
That suggests that individual smartphone users’ data consumption is growing rapidly and that O2 is now trying to slow it down by putting up barriers to greater use. “At the moment the tap is running all the time and we don’t know where,” suggested the spokeswoman. “The model for data provision is broken, and data consumption is growing. We’re looking at ways of how to charge people for data.”
O2′s spokeswoman said that rebalancing the tariffs would mean that the company could plan its network capacity: “as soon as people know how much data they’re consuming, they can make a decision about whether to use their phone.” But that is not borne out if 97% of users will see no change – because their surfing habits will persist as before.
Some have suggested that O2 is worried about the growth of music streaming services such as Spotify, which is now available for the iPhone and other smartphones: if more people adopt it, that will put a heavier load on the phone network, yet O2 receives no money from Spotify for providing the service. O2 denied this, though. “If people have a phone, they can use it for whatever they like,” said the spokeswoman.
Instead, O2 suggested, it is trying to change the behaviour of a tiny number of users – reckoned to be just 1% of iPhone users – who use very large amounts of data. “There’s only 3% [of smartphone users] who use more than 1GB of mobile data per month. But actually it’s just 1% [of smartphone users] who use about one third – to be precise, 36% – of the network data traffic. I suppose they must be streaming all the time or something.”
Asked whether the move away from the unlimited to new data tariffs for all forthcoming iPhone 4 users would have been more simply managed by contacting that 1% – about 2,000 people – and asking them to change their behaviour, rather than introducing entirely new billing systems for all future owners, O2′s spokeswoman said: “It’s about educating people. We have 24m customers. But this change doesn’t affect any existing customers.”
Asked what O2 will do if those data-hungry 2,000 do not upgrade to the new limited tariffs, the spokeswoman said: “Eventually they will come to the end of their contract, or they will want a new handset.”
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
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O2 has announced that it will allow customers to buy out their existing
contract and upgrade immediately to an iPhone 4, but the deal may not be as
generous as it first appears, experts warned.
Read Full Story…
(Source Yahoo UK News)
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Apple’s ’4G’ device is out this month. Will Steve Jobs also cut the price of the current model and challenge Nokia head-on?
Steve Jobs will appear before the Apple faithful tomorrow to reveal the latest version of the Californian technology group’s mobile phone. Nicknamed the iPhone “4G” – on the basis that the last one was the 3GS, with the “S” standing for speed – it will be the summer’s must-have gadget, hitting the UK this month. But it is also seen as being in the vanguard of an all-out assault on the mobile market.
In the three years since it launched its first handset, Apple has grabbed the headlines and, more importantly, snatched a lucrative share of the more mature mobile phone markets of the US and Europe, where consumers are willing to pay upwards of £30 a month to get an iPhone. Now, speculation is rising that the company is approaching a so-called “iPod moment” in mobiles: the point at which it will decide that it can capture a much larger slice of the market by producing more than one device.
The success of the App Store, which has seen iPhone users download billions of applications, coupled with the pressure to have a wide market to attract advertisers to its embryonic iAd platform, is pushing Apple towards diversifying, just as it did with the iPod six years ago when it introduced the iPod mini. There is also increasing competition from Google’s Android platform. After two and a half years, handset manufacturers are finally producing compelling Android phones – such as the HTC Desire – and more are slated for release this year, including the mass-market HTC Wildfire.
But rather than unveil a new, cheaper version of the iPhone, Apple is expected to position the iPhone 4G at the top of the smartphone market and reorganise the existing range. The company is likely to halt production of the iPhone 3G – which cannot cope with Apple’s new multi-tasking software – and scrap both existing versions of the iPhone 3GS, which have 16GB and 32GB of memory. It will replace them with a new 8GB version of the 3GS, which is expected to be aimed at the wider market.
The iPhone 4G – according to mobile industry insiders who have seen one and confirmed widespread web leaks – will be available in two versions: 32GB and 64GB. These will put “clear blue water” between it and the mass-market 3GS, as one industry executive puts it. The 4G is slightly smaller and slimmer than the current 3GS. It has an improved 5-megapixel camera with flash and uses micro-sim cards, as seen in the iPad. It also has a glass back, which greatly assists phone reception. In the UK, it is expected to be sold by the same mobile phone networks that have the current iPhone: O2, Orange and Vodafone. It is unclear whether Tesco Mobile will have the 4G when it is launched in the last week of this month.
The parallels between Apple’s current position in the mobile phone market and the place it held in the digital music market when it introduced the iPod mini are revealing. The first iPod appeared in late 2001, but it was not until 2003 that Apple launched the iTunes store. One million tracks were sold in the first five days and 70m in the first year. That showed Apple there was a real mass market for digital music and was a spur for the creation of the first variant of the iPod line, the iPod mini, the following year.
At the time, Apple was lodged firmly in the high end of the market for digital music players. The iPod was the benchmark by which all others were measured and Apple had a share of about 30%. The iPod mini – replaced at the end of 2005 by the Nano – was designed to grab a large part of the next third down. In similar fashion, the iPhone has become the handset by which other mobiles are measured, and in markets including the UK it has made Apple the third-largest mobile phone manufacturer after Nokia and Samsung. It is now a question of how much of the rest of the market – chock full of me-too touchscreen devices from the likes of Nokia, LG and Samsung – Apple wants.
“I would argue that they may already have reached the tipping point,” Ben Wood at CCS Insight – a long-time follower of the mobile market – says. “The iPhone has become a ubiquitous product in the markets where its pricing is acceptable.”
He believes that a real driver behind Apple’s growth will be the iAd platform, which Jobs announced this year alongside the new version of the iPhone software – which is also in the iPad. The new mobile advertising platform is designed to allow iPhone app developers to create in-app advertising. Currently, anyone who clicks on an advert in a downloadable app is bounced out of it and on to the advertiser’s webpage. As a result, many users are put off clicking on adverts. In contrast, iAd will allow full-screen video and interactive advertising content to be served within an application. Crucially, Apple will sell and serve the adverts, and developers will receive 60% of their iAd revenue.
“With iAd, which could be as significant to Apple as the iPod franchise itself, Apple has a tremendous opportunity. It will provide a further chance to lock in their leading position in application development,” Wood says. “If iAd becomes the kind of phenomenon that Apple appears to be able to create, and becomes as big as it could, then potentially Apple could really disrupt the market by subsidising the iPhone from their iAd revenues.”
But whether iAd means that Apple needs to go all the way into the low end of the market is doubtful.
“IPhone users are a segment of the population that has affinity with technology and disposable income, and that is a marketeer’s dream already,” Wood says.
And Carolina Milanesi, research vice-president at rival analysts Gartner, is not convinced that this is the right time for Apple to go mass market, citing price constraints on the iPhone’s most important feature – its large touchscreen.
“On the iPod touch and the iPhone, the screen is very important,” she says. “Music is easier [to do in a mass-market device] because it is just [data] storage, and with the price of storage coming down you can experiment with design. But when you have applications running on the device, how much dumber can your device become before it is useless? And that is where they are going to struggle. What else do you cut?”
Apple could cut its own profits, but it has shown little desire to do that in the past: the switch from the 3G to the 3GS actually reduced the manufacturing cost of the phone, analysts reckon.
“Yes, of course, they can expand their addressable market so much quicker, but do they want that?” says Milanesi. “Just as Jobs says Apple does not want to be the Dell of the PC market, [so] Apple does not want to be the Nokia of the mobile market.” How true that is will be revealed tomorrow.
While Apple fans will drool over the new iPhone this week, tragic events in China have thrown a spotlight on the human cost of the west’s obsession with shiny toys. A spate of suicides at the massive Chinese plant run by Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn has called into question working conditions at one of Apple’s largest suppliers.
The Californian company has dispatched a team of investigators to discover why 10 people have killed themselves so far this year. Management at the Shenzhen facility, which stretches across three square kilometers and employs more than 250,000 people, are trying to solve the problem by hiring counsellors, playing soothing music on production lines, increasing wages and asking new recruits to sign a ‘”no-suicide” contract. They are also taking more direct action, installing netting around outdoor stairwells of the dormitory buildings, where workers sleep eight to a room.
Speaking last week, Steve Jobs said Apple was “diligent” when it came to understanding the working conditions in the supply chain, auditing its direct suppliers as well as tertiary suppliers.
“We are over there trying to understand what is happening and more importantly trying to understand how we can help because it is a difficult situation,” he told the D8 conference organised by All Things Digital. He said many young workers came from poor rural areas and were away from home for the first time.
“They are probably less prepared to leave home than your typical High School student going to college in this country. I think there are some real issues there,” he said.
But he stressed: “Foxconn is not a sweatshop. They have got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it is a pretty nice factory.”
Some of Foxconn’s workers disagree, complaining the monotonous workload causes depression. “I do the same thing every day,” Xiao Qi, a college graduate who works at Foxconn in product development told Bloomberg Businessweek. “I have no future.”
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
A whole new standard has been set with the Dell Streak that is certainly capable of matching the functionality of a laptop, with the added benefit of phone calling, and surpassing the experience given by smartphones with its 5 inch capacitive touch-screen and super slim 10mm design. Four customisable home screens, multi-touch capabilities, a 1Ghz processor and pinch and zoom ensure that all the applications and features run smoothly.
The graphical qualities are amazing with a resolution of 800×480 pixels providing high-definition video playback. Your own videos can be uploaded to YouTube within a few easy clicks and social networking integration makes uploading pictures a breeze. The 5 megapixel camera has the functionality of a dedicated device with auto-focus, dual LED flash, geo-tagging, an editor and face/smile detection. A secondary camera is also provided to allow video calling.
Access to the Internet is granted with a 3G HSDPA connection that rivals the experience obtained via broadband and with portrait or landscape viewing web pages can be enjoyed with ease. The Android OS v1.6 can be upgraded to v2.2. The connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, quad-band roaming and a HDMI port is provided for connecting to a TV. The Dell Streak offers the best of both worlds and with a GPS receiver, digital compass and Google Maps the package is rounded off nicely.
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Anyone going to the World Cup or abroad can minimise the cost of mobile calls, text messages and internet fees
As if the thousands of UK travellers trapped abroad after the recent volcanic ash drama hadn’t suffered enough damage to their bank balances, many are now facing mobile phone “bill shock“.
These holidaymakers, many of whom are just receiving their latest mobile phone bills, may be dismayed when they discover how much they have spent on calls and data roaming while stranded abroad. The Observer recently ran a story about William Harrison, a student who accidentally ran up an £8,000 phone bill with Orange while in France by using his mobile to access the internet.
In theory, mobile bills should no longer be too painful for those travelling to Europe, as from 1 March all European mobile operators have been obliged under EU roaming rules to offer their customers a cut-off limit of €50 (about £45) for using the internet on their phones. However, it is still early days and not yet clear whether all operators are complying with this rule.
In a month’s time the regulations will tighten further, as at the moment customers need to opt-in to this limit, whereas from 1 July the cut-off limit will be set at €50 by default unless they opt out.
For those travelling further afield the cost of calling, texting and using the internet on their mobile can still be an expensive pastime. Independent consumer body Consumer Focus warned World Cup ticket holders last week that costs for calls, texts and data use could add up to more than £100 on a match day – more than the face value of a ticket.
Mobile phone operators are expected to start bringing out more competitive overseas mobile phone packages in the next few weeks as the holiday season hots up.
But for now, anyone who is about to go abroad has a number of options: doing nothing and sticking with their operator’s standard overseas charges (expensive); switching to their operator’s overseas calls package (cheaper); buying a global or local sim (potentially even cheaper, depending on usage).
Mike Wilson, mobiles and broadband manager at moneysupermarket.com, says: “Don’t underestimate how easy it is to rack up a hefty mobile bill if you are going overseas and planning to use your phone.
“Before escaping the country be sure to check with your operator how much calls, texts and internet use will set you back when you’re away, because you won’t be charged the same rates as your UK tariff. I would advise asking if there is a cheaper international tariff available.”
For standard call charges in Europe, T-Mobile and Virgin are the most expensive at 43p a minute, according to moneysupermarket.com, while 02 is the cheapest at 35p a minute. Network operator 3 is the cheapest for receiving calls at 15p a minute compared to Orange, T-Mobile and Virgin, which all charge the most at 19p. Sending texts is 11p a message with all networks, and all are free to receive.
The cost of using the internet is where operators’ charges vary hugely, and where holidaymakers are most likely to run up large bills. T-Mobile, 3, 02 and Orange all charge a flat fee per megabyte (MB) of between £1.25 (3) and £3 (02 and Orange), while Vodafone and Virgin offer the option of either paying per MB, or paying either a daily or hourly fee for web usage (with a cap on how much data can be used).
Virgin, for example, charges £5 a MB, or £4 for a one-hour pass with a 3MB limit and £6 for a 24-hour pass with a 5MB limit.
Whichever package you have you need to be careful about how much data you download. One MB is not much – watching a two-hour film uses about 800 MB.
All these charges when incurred within Europe are considerably lower than in some other countries. For example, if you visit Egypt with your Orange phone you will pay £1.75 a minute to call home and £8 per MB of data used, while in Australia you will pay £1.20 a minute per call and £7.50 per MB of data with T-Mobile.
To keep costs down, a good alternative is to opt for your operator’s travel package. Vodafone’s Passport deal, for example, means you pay your standard home rate to call the UK from more than 35 European countries (and from Australia and New Zealand) after paying a 75p connection charge. These calls can be part of your inclusive minutes if you are on a contract. To receive calls you pay the 75p connection charge and you can talk for up to 60 minutes free of charge. After that you pay 20p a minute.
02′s My Europe Extra, on the other hand, is £10 a month for 25p-a-minute calls, free received calls and 11p texts.
You can avoid your UK operator’s charges altogether by switching your network sim card for a global or local sim using websites such as 0044.co.uk and UK2Abroad.co.uk. A global sim card will work across a number of countries so is particularly good for frequent travellers or backpackers, while a local sim will only work in one country. You can buy these before you travel, but you might need to get your phone unlocked by your operator so you can switch cards.
Most global and local sims cost somewhere between £15 and £30 and come loaded with differing amounts of call credit, which you can top up by credit or debit card at any time. For those travelling to South Africa for the World Cup, for example, 0044′s South African local sim costs £29.99 and gives you ZAR 55 (about £5) of credit.
After that, local calls cost 10p a minute off-peak, calls to the UK are 63p a minute, while texts to the UK are 15p. This compares with the standard pay-as-you-go rates on Orange where charges for local calls within South Africa and to the UK are £1.45 a minute and texts are 50p a message.
Buying a local or global sim will mean you temporarily have a new phone number, so you will need to make sure people know this before you go.
Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)
Free on pay monthly contracts from O2, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz Pro adds a slide out QWERTY keyboard to the stylish. With the addition of a keyboard Sony Ericsson has compromised on its camera with a downgrade from 8 megapixels to 5 megapixels. However, an LED flash, autofocus and geo-tagging still remain and it takes great photos.
What stands out for the Vivaz Pro is the 3.2 inch TFT touchscreen which has a scratch resistant coasting and a 16:9 aspect and 360×640 pixel resolution. The Vivaz Pro supports handwriting recognition and a built in accelerometer.
The Vivaz Pro comes with integrated Facebook, Twitter and YouTube applications and fast internet connection thanks to HSDPA. There is also GPS with G-Maps and WisePilot for turn-by-turn navigation. Other features include an FM radio, a very good media player, up to 16GB memory and 3D gaming.
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