Content producers should chip in for mobile internet costs

This is a title

"Consumer fees alone are not enough to pay for the infrastructure needed to deliver content to mobile phones".

In any other field of business, that means you have to either raise prices or do something about your costs. It's not the service providers fault that the network operators are incompetent.

And the problem is?

He wants money for what? People pay for "unlimited" access and that's what they should get. If it isn't cost effective then don't offer it.

Title

Isn't the purpose of the fees TO pay for the cost of delivering the content? If the operators aren't charging enough then that's their problem.

Nice!

Did you set the prices too low to entice customers in and make promises you now cannot keep?

So now you want others to dig you out by fronting up cash to pay the costs, well let me just take a look and see who else is providing services like yours!

Cry me a river

Do the job you were paid to do and should have been continually doing (Upgrading the infrastructure to meet future demand) for the last 5 years at least.

Everyone saw this coming.

No No No No......

Charge your bloody customers. If your business plan relies on getting subsidies from others to make your profits* by cutting your fees,theyby making you look bette value than you are, then you deserve to crash and burn.

If the customer wants to download huge fat files, then they should pay. If the customer then realises that the company delivering these files are costing them to much, they will leave the site, therefore, fatfile.inc will have to adapt or die.

Simple.

Oh dear

My heart bleeds for O2, it really does...

For new customers they already charge users more who go over their mobile data allowance, so get more revenue from higher users anyway. Even for people like me who are on a contract without a data limit have a "fair useage" policy to abide by.

Sounds like they want to get more money for increased mobile data useage from both ends, the consumber AND the provider.

letters and digits cannot take your subject right now - please hold

This has been said before but worth saying again.

When I pay for internet service and my download cap is x Gb/month then I expect the network I'm using to be able to deliver x Gb of data per month regardless of whether I "spend" that monthly allowance on a million large emails, or 1 viewing of a program on iPlayer.

Moving from the BS of "Unlimited" internet to download caps was supposed to solve the problem of bandwidth intensive users by setting a limit to how much they could download for their monthly fee. Who cares what they download? Streaming (in the example above) needs lower latency than emails and there is probably higher demand at peak times (e.g. evenings) but that's up to network providers to use innovative pricing to get people downloading iPlayer programs at night when the network is quieter.

I can appreciate the point about content providers being more efficient in their network use if they're paying towards it, but I don't agree since this is already covered by the download cap. If the BBC want to deliver a one hour HD iPlayer program that will suck 10 Gb of my 50 Gb monthly limit then I'm not going to watch it, while also complaining bitterly to the Beeb about their bloated HD download size.

But really what this is about is O2 bitching in public about their paying subscribers wanting to use the services they've paid for. Perhaps they should get on with the network investment backlog that seems to date back beyond the BT Cellnet days!

Not that old chestnut

Get out of the bit delivery business if you don't enjoy it.

Don't the content producers pay to be connected to the internet?

I am sorry, they themselves are fueling the increase by pushing ever more sophisticated handsets, I don't remember O2 saying when I bought my Iphone please don't use it for mobile internet.

This idea that content producers don't pay for their content to be hosted or transmitted over the internet is crazy, of course they do... so why would they pay twice?

Stop whinging O2 and stop stealing the money from our pockets, I don't remember you reporting losses. The AT&T of UK

He's just repeating Telefonica's line

They've been banging on about this in Spain for some months too.

Should've invested in their network instead of just charging for iPhones and using the money to go on a spending spree in Latin America and Portgual.

Mobile speak with Forked Tongue

The content providers already pay for their pipe

The voice customers are already massively subsiding Data.

Why don't they simply price it per Gigabyte used based on cost and add a normal margin?

Or are they more interested in growing customer base and want everyone else to subsidise this?

See how the subsidised prices are wrecking Ireland's Infrastructure: http://irelandoffline.org/2009/08/is-mobile-midband-in-ireland-destroying-broadband-infrastructure/

and as mentioned earlier here 3's voice subsidy of Data

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056080309

Don't listen to ANYTHING mobile operators say.

Deja vu ?

Didn't we have this argument when the iPlayer was launched ? ISPs started whining because all of a sudden their "unlimited" plans were shown up to be anything but.

I'm probably a bit thick, but my understanding of business, is that "profits" are what are left *after* investments. So if O2, Vodaphone et al can post huge profits, then there is clearly scope for a bit of investment in the infrastructure of what they are supposed to be fucking doing in the first place ?

Ugh FFS

Content producers already pay their contribution towards infrastructure costs - they pay for their own infrastructure including for their own peering/transit and often for their own international links/links between facilities. Sorry O2 but if you're not making money on it, that's a failure in your own business model.

Quite right too...

And those light-bulb producers should be contributing to the cost of the electricity they're making me burn.

Rubbish!

How about putting back the MONEY that consumers PAY YOU to use your crappy network into actually making it WORK?

Is the problem bandwidth hogs or capitalist pigs?

Sprint (for example) is running ads here in the States touting the ease and enjoyment of downloading movies to your shiny new Samsung handset over their 4G network.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they're complaining about how a small number of users is consuming a disproportionate amount of bandwidth, causing network congestion, blah blah blah, and how, with much regret, they're being forced to abandon the unlimited plans in favor of tiered pricing.

Flawed Business model

Another ISP moaning about their flawed "sell it cheaper than their competitors" business model. When will these guys realise that consumers will pay more to get more quality.

The supermarkets do this quite happily (Tesco's have a value range, the standard range and a premium range). People are happy to pay extra for extra services/quality

subsidy?

"Dunne said that the problem facing mobile network operators was that they were investing billions of pounds in infrastructure to cope with a massive increase in data use, while facing a very price-competitive market."

Er, that's the network operators' business. If they can't make money out of that, they should hand in their licences and let someone else have a go.

In just about every other part of the economy, we've decided that cross-subsidy is generally a wrong-headed idea: it rewards bad behaviour.

Sounds fair but the devil is in the detail.

It's a bit like road taxes, trucks pay more.

But there again, the biggies in the media transmission do pay the freight. Imagine just how much governments load the system with, do they pay the full rate?

@JaitcH - wrong

No. It's like asking Ford, Vauxhall etc to pay for the roads their cars use.

Promise only what you can deliver

>> If consumers alone are paying for the data there is no incentive on content providers to use networks efficiently

That would depend how much you charge to provide for the bandwidth to download that content.

If your pricing is fixed fee for "unlimited" data then no - there is no incentive. If however you charge per Mb or have a reasonably capped limit then there is an incentive - users won't use content providers that cost them a fortune or use up all their cap inefficiently.

That aside if, like all internet providers should, O2 ploughed more of the profits back into the infrastructure this wouldn't be such an issue. If that isn't feasible then they should market their bandwidth & charge their customers appropriately for the network capabilities.

Wakey wakey

When will these morons realise that the consumer is not buying bandwidth for its own sake, but for access to content. Without the content, the service suppliers would have no market whatsoever.

If they're stupid enough to offer "unlimited" bandwidth contracts, without realising that someone would try to fill it for their own advantage, they are not fit to be employed in business, and should be sweeping the streets or some such.

too many good posts

I was going to vote up all the posts saying that ISPs should be able to deliver what they advertise, but there are too many, so I wrote this instead.

Plus, I have an 'unlimited' data contract on O2. Why can't I use tethering without paying more? Oh right, maybe it's not unlimited. Bawh.

meh a title

This is just one of the many reasons why I dropped O2 and I will drop any company that tries this kind of stuff. I pay for access to the internet not a limited subset that you like or pays what in my eyes amounts to a bribe.

I already paying for a set amount of GB per month (lets not get onto the fact that set amount is advertised as unlimited, the maximum allowed in the AUP is the actual limit and what I go off). I expect to be able to use that many GB each month on anything on the internet if I choose to.

1GB of data is the same amount of data no matter where it comes from, no matter if its Iplayer or downloads from and app store. It still the same amount of bytes from the internet.

Add to that that the content providers already are paying for their upstream and thus paying for their content. As a customer my fee's are paying for the delivery of that content, if your undercharging then that's your own fault and your own flawed business model.

If you sell something at a price less than it costs to provide then you will loose money, many ISP's have gone bust for the same reason's. Ether increase your prices, cross subsidise from your other product's or crash and burn, ether option is fine by me, but trying to bribe content provides is just not acceptable.