Customers want more choices in how they can mix and match services, and they are willing to pay for a greater degree of personalization across services, such as email, web browsing, social networking, multi-user gaming, sports/news/video, voice over IP, TV and movies, cloud, and remote lock/remote wipe.
In addition, customers ranked pricing concepts based on usage and specific applications higher than those based on bandwidth/performance, family sharing/bundling of devices, casual usage, or free access with advertising.
Service providers have an opportunity to generate incremental revenues if they sell tailored services to customers whose devices are capable, but not yet part of a mobile data plan.
These are some of the findings in Signals Research Group’s "Mobile Broadband Pricing and Bundling – the Voice of the Consumer” report about subscribers’ preferences for pricing and service bundles, and the factors driving their choices.
Sponsored by Tekelec, the report covers data gathered from almost 3,500 mobile broadband consumers in Brazil, India, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The report found that usage-based pricing and paying for specific applications are the preferred pricing concepts on a global basis. Family sharing is the preferred pricing model in South Korea and comes in second out of seven in the United States.
Free access ranked very differently country by country, providing an indicator of which countries might be more amenable to mobile advertising and subsidized free access than others. For example, 86% of respondents in Brazil expressed interest in free access as a pricing concept.
Also, security (remote lock/remote wipe), web browsing, and email stand out as the preferred services globally.
Brazil, India, and South Korea prefer consumer/entertainment-oriented services like VoIP and video, while the UK and the US prefer productivity-oriented services like web browsing and email.