There are two truths that are becoming increasingly apparent from the carrier perspective.
- Voice plans are so commoditized that margins are shrinking at an increasing rate.
- Unlimited data plans are an increasing burden to carriers both from a capacity and a financial perspective.
So what are carriers to do? Enter the burgeoning trend of tiered pricing and/or pay as you go for data.
While this will create arguably stronger revenue streams for the carriers, this will create absolute havoc to organizations as they wrestle with their increasing wireless expenses. Why? Because today - for the most part - data plans are all you can eat and you pay a fixed price. We're soon going to move to a new paradigm where organizations will need to more proactively monitor the data consumption...just like organizations are looking now at voice plan consumption. Expense management professionals are going to have to deal with ONE MORE THING...assuming they are not leveraging a wireless expense management solution that will help them monitor and optimize that component of their wireless bills.
The flip side is that you could also see a trend where we move from all you can eat data and having to measure the voice calls to the opposite, where voice is all you can eat and then we have to measure and manage the data consumption. The News.com article says average data consumption is about 25-100MB a month per user. That CLEARLY does not include iPhone users. In fact, I'll argue that as we see more web friendly user experiences, you'll see that data consumption increase exponentially across all platforms...even on BlackBerry that has amazing data compression.
Organizations need to start planning today for how they are going to deal with the changing market dynamics of increased data consumption and more complex data pricing from carriers. I encourage them to start thinking today about how they will be able to proactively manage these changing expenses.
