Combine three recent pieces of news:
1: Telecom got fined $500,000 by the Commerce Commission for offering “unlimited data usage and all the internet you can handle”, paying another $8.4m in compensation to customers. The offering was less than unlimited in speed after everybody jumped on board – oh and they were shaping as well.
2: Telecom is currently giving away (essentially) T-Sticks, which offer data for your laptop over the XT network, to any existing Telecom broadband customer. Pay $30 in pre-pay credits and walk away with one. It’s “while stocks last” – so be quick.
3: AT&T is saying that heavy data use is overloading cell-sites. It seems that 3% of iPhone users account for 40% of traffic, so they are going to start charging for heavy data use.
With a question:
4: When will Telecom become an official supplier of iPhone? Surely it has to be soon – it has been over 6 months since launch of XT and it’s the only network that provides true 3G access throughout NZ for the iPhone.
And then ask:
If the iPhone is made official soon, and given all of the above, then how much data and how many devices can Telecom’s XT network really cope with?
Will we be starting to see clogging of the virtual pipes?
Will Telecom look red-faced once again?
What is Vodafone doing in response to all of this?
Time will tell, but in the meantime go get yourself a free T-Stick if you have Telecom broadband.
<update. It’s Monday morning and XT is down “south of Taupo”. That’s got to be a coincidence but it does make you wonder>
Lance Wiggs 
I heard a rumour that xt cell sites have a fibre backbone so perhaps they won’t have the same problems
LikeLike
In the US they offer ‘unlimited’ usage plans, unlike in NZ, where usage has tiny little caps, which means the usage won’t exceed their capacity. The amount of data they offer and the price of data in proportional to the capacity. If they offered unlimited data usage, then no doubt usage would overload their capacity.
LikeLike
There has been a big deal made about the investment in backhaul from cell sites (as a differentiator) so pushing the mobile data is perhaps a great way to monetise this?
I think in the US they had all you can eat plans on mobile data here they charge per MB or have a cap which you then get charged beyond. So I’m sure iPhones as high usage devices would be welcome.
It’s easy to run an iPhone on XT just buy it from the apple store and insert your sim. The business model that Apple runs is interesting, this post explains some of it, and I’m sure they would have specific demands of any carrier..
http://gigaom.com/2009/12/09/who-is-getting-rich-off-the-iphone/
LikeLike
the AT&T thing is a total red herring. all the iphone customers on AT&T have unlimited date plans. Yes, UNLIMITED. this means tens or even hundreds of GBs of data from the high users.
In contrast,the typical mobile data plan here is 1GB, and the largest is the 4GB(+4GB free) plan on XT.
No comparison at all really.
LikeLike