Following on from previous discussions of the dropping of “unlimited” data in smartphone contracts, CEO of UK network O2 Ronan Dunne blogs about the changes and why he believes they are fair and transparent. In any unmetered system, there will be heavy users consuming the most resource – it’s the nature of the arithmetic – but is this a long term plan, a quick fix, or a grab for more income?

In part, Dunne writes:

We don’t think it’s fair that the many should subsidise the behaviour of the few, and we think that we have a responsibility to our customers to address this kind of imbalance. So from June, O2 will pioneer a simple but important change to our billing structure, in which we will begin to ask our heaviest data users to pay more for using large amounts of data. The vast majority of our users will be completely unaffected by the changes – 97% of our smartphone customers currently use less than 500MB of data every month.

Lots of questions are still being asked, especially in the comments to that article (by the way kudos for O2 to have the comments open and be responding to them); including some crackers Slash Gear’s Chris Davies; "...this situation isn't going to get better in terms of people realising they should be frugal and use less data."

And it’s interesting that the O2 incubation project that is Giffgaff (which uses the O2 network infrastructure) is still offering unlimited texts, calls and internet access for £35 a month with no immediate plans to follow their sugar daddy for pricing.