All You Can Eat - The Riposte

So you’ve heard Andrew Bud’s take on all you can eat data (previous post). Now, I’m delighted to say, we have a conflicting view, not from a network operator, but from Bruce Renny, Marketing Director at ROK Entertainment Corporation.
Renny’s take on all you can eat data bundles is that they are an important loyalty-building tool, given the relatively low cost of data bandwidth to the networks.
“Mobile networks in the UK have been myopic and greedy where data is concerned for two reasons” says Renny. “They have to push the 3G mantra, so they have penalised GPRS usage to drive usage to 3G. Some of them account for GPRS sales on the bottom line of the balance sheet. But how much does GPRS bandwidth physically cost them? It is tiny, so the advantage to the networks of offering all you can eat bundles is that it turns a passive talk and text customer into a data subscriber. It reduces customer churn and raises individual customer ARPU.
"Sure, if usage gets out of control, they have to have a fallback, hence the fair usage clauses, but with ROK TV, we find the typical consumption of the average subscriber around the world is 25-35MB a month, which is not onerous for the network. If you can turn a relatively passive talk and text customer into a data subscriber, you reduce the likelihood of him churning and raise his ARPU, without sacrificing an onerous amount of bandwidth.”
So now you’ve heard both sides of the argument, as it used to say on my exam papers, Discuss.

David Murphy
Editor