Is Price The Only Thing Mobile Customers Really Care About?
from the falling,-falling dept
It may be a little surprising to learn that mobile number portability (the ability to keep the same phone number when switching providers) wasn't introduced in Japan until last week. MNP's introduction has set off a fierce round of churn in Japan -- rather unlike what happened in the US -- as operators look to steal customers from their rivals. Given that Japan is such a mature and advanced market, it's not surprising to see operators trying to compete on the basis of their content and data services, such as KDDI trying to lure customers in with its music offerings. But even with Japanese mobile users' widespread and long-standing use of mobile data services, when it comes down to it, it appears all they really care about is price. Softbank, which purchased the country's third biggest operator, Vodafone KK, earlier this year, said its strategy to grab new users would be to start a price war and undercut NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, its bigger rivals. People have apparently flocked to it in such large numbers that Softbank had to stop taking new customers twice over the weekend because its computer system couldn't keep up. While Softbank isn't disclosing any numbers, there's widespread belief that it's already gained a huge number of new subscribers. Mobile operators around the world tend to hate competing on price, because the only real overall effect is to lower their average revenue per user. If operators in one of the world's most advanced markets can't use data and content services as effective differentiators against low prices, it may not bode well for operators in other, less advanced markets.
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Phone companies don't listen
...yeah...need to lay off the sugar a bit.
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Yeah...
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I'm not following your logic
If it's such an advanced market and all of the providers offer a robust selection of content, why does price as a differentiator seem so shocking? In this context, I would take 'advanced' to mean that they've already been through the point where everything is expensive, the point where somebody gets cheaper, the point where everybody else gets cheaper, the point where somebody offers a premium service for a premium price and the point where everybody has a premium offering. Now they're back to a price war. It's the Economic Circle of Life.
This doesn't bode anything for anybody except economics professors.
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Price is the limiting factor
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On point
A good example of this (and for that matter a good example of everything) is the automobile industry. 3 to 4 years ago, GM couldn't hardly sell a car. their prices got too low and they realized they had to add new features. OnStar and XM Radio (along with Sirius radio in Ford vehicles) has given GM (and ford) a new feature, and a 2007 Lincoln Navigator costs more than a 2005 Lincoln navigator did (even in late 2004 when they were new) due to this new feature, which Toyota, Honda, and the others have not matched. Just the same, Toyota has their Prius, a car which despite all odds sells for more used than it does new sometimes. In 3 to 4 more years, these features will become standardized. There will be Chevy Silverado's running on either a Hybrid or Ethenol (or both) just as there will be XM Radio in the 2010 Prius, and once this happens, prices on both the GM/Ford cars and the foreign cars will fall. By 2014 or so, somebody will have developed a Hydrogen car a person can actually afford, or a Tesla Roadster (the super-expensive celebrity electric car) will be "cool" instead of a Hummer, and those types of cars will become expensive - either GM and Ford will create Hydrogen and Electric variants (like the now defunct E1 GM made way back) or they'll just go bankrupt one day
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There is a solution for that
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Good point but bad example
If your phone is a GSM phone (Cingular, Alltell, T-Mobile, and some others) try removing the SIM card and booting it and you'll see what I mean. You can also get an older phone (a good example is the nokia 3390 offered by both t-mobile and cingular as a contract phone around 1999-2000 for free with the contract) and often these work best. The 3390 in particular works as it has no data capabilities, can be bought both cheaply and in bulk on ebay, gets reasonable battery life (2 days of standby even with full usage and service, 4 if used properly) and also has one really big, center button, which takes the SOS function when it's turned on, making it ideal for elderly people with poor or no vision (i.e. "just feel for the big center button.")
I wasn't sure if you knew about this or are perhaps looking for a phone and/or plan for a parent, etc, but now you know. Just a tip.
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Using hydrogen to power a car is insanely stupid. Not only is it horrifically expensive, it's not even 'green' in any meaningful sense. Plus, it has a very wide explosive air mixture. Releasing all of the energy of a tank of gasoline instantaneously is very difficult, but with compressed hydrogen, it is trivial. It would be easy to modify a 600 bar hydrogen tank with 8-10 kg of hydrogen to be a very effective terrorist bomb, and would take only a few relatively cheap components -- so it's only a matter of time before it happens.
OTOH, the EV has some promise, especially with a new breakthrough in lithium batteries that promises no more explosive thermal runaway, incredibly fast charge time, and more than 9000 cycles.
But the real future of alternative fuels is biodiesel -- it can be made cheaper than dinodiesel, it's cleaner-burning, and much safer than hydrogen (or even ethanol). Plus it can be used in unmodified diesel engines.
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Yep
It's completely stupid. There are still customers that NEED and only WANT the most basic of hardware and plans, but these idiot cell companies only supply hardware to sell their features. Here's a big middle-finger to the cell companies!
P.S.
If you have the time to type out a text message, you had the time to call that very person and leave a voicemail.
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two cents worth
That is the point of a Hydrogen Generator, it separates the molecules of water, H2O, using the Hydrogen to burn and releasing the Oxygen into the atmosphere. You would have an Electric car that has the Hydrogen Generator that would be used to charge the batteries and in most long distance operations, be the direct power source for the drive motors.
Running low on fuel? Pull over and fill your tank with water.
BTW, this is the same technology that NASA uses on the Shuttle to power the electronics and re-supply the crew with Oxygen, and MIT has had a car running on this same technology for about ten years.
Now if I can just get one of them to run my cell phone I could get the battery to last more then 90 minutes of talking.
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tired
maybe you guys should try using them, you can find a lot of them useful if you open your mind.
if you take a little extra time when getting your new phone to learn all of its capabilities, you may realize that it's pretty handy.
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Softbank is trying to repeat their adsl strategy where they aggressively competed on price to gain market share. The strategy was apparently successful since Softbank says that its adsl business is now profitable. The strategy may be more difficult to apply to mobile phones due to the complexity of the pricing plans and services offered by each carrier.
Number portability is also not very attractive in Japan since the internet e-mail address available on all Japanese mobile phones cannot be transferred to the new carrier. E-mail usage (not sms) is often more important than phone usage with Japanese mobile phone.
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Its called customer service - its all very well another company offering me infinite numbers of minutes at dirt cheap prices which works out to cost me a little more per month but giving me a LOT more "free" stuff but when i know i dont need the extra talk time and would have to put up with a phone thats locked to one network and restricts what i can do with it (only access "approved" internet sites for a start) i dont want anything to do with it! The woman in the shop refused to be able to understand my logic but i dont mind paying extra for good service.
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Re: Yep
All I need is a phone that makes calls and the battery doesn't go dead so fast. I had a Nikia 1100 last year, it was fantastic, it made calls, super uasy to txt and the battery lasted a week. if I want a damn PDA I'll buy one, but I just want a phone.
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Re: two cents worth
This, coming from somebody who appears to believe in perpetual motion.
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