How much will your mobile phone bill cost you this month? Or next month? You've probably got a rough idea in your head, but it's never going to be precise. You might decide to spend an hour on the phone to your Aunty Jean in Inverness in the afternoon. You might suddenly need to have a hugely involved conversation with your boss via SMS. Or, bank managers be praised, you might need to go online to check your email while roaming in northern France.
Certainly in the UK and European Union, the regulators are constantly taking a look at the pricing of elements of mobile phone contracts. The deadline for the networks to look at their roaming charges and SMS costs passed at the end of June, and in all likelihood we'll see some EU directive to cut down those portions of the bill in the near future.
But I'm wondering if it would be better to take this a step further. With churn still worryingly high, and as customers bounce around networks looking for the best deals and shaving a pound or so off their 'average' bill, perhaps an innovative mobile provider can grab the bull by the horns and provide a fixed, flat rate, monthly plan.
There are already a few flat rate items you can get on your mobile bill, including data, but what I'm talking about here is a 100%, all the way, flat rate plan. You pop down your forty or fifty pounds a month and everything is covered. You get your calls in that bundle; you get your SMS included; it's a flat rate data plan - in other words, it's a fixed bill in all ways. You get the phone and a modern media connection, and the complete confidence to use it as much or as little as you want.
Sure it might not give a network the variance to make a short term profit on a monthly basis, but I think that handing consumers the confidence of never being surprised by their monthly bill will be a very attractive prospect for people looking for a new contract and those looking to switch contracts. With a contract like that I think I'd be happy to look at an 18 or even 24 month contract.
Okay there are going to be gotchas. You pretty much have to have some definition of fair use in there, but really that should just be set to stop people using it as an always-on tethered connection for their desktops or laptops – say 5GB a month as a 'warning limit?' And you might need to have fair use for foreign calls as well.
The tricky (or should I say profitable?) part of the equation is roaming. Well let's put a fixed price on that as well. How about an additional twenty five pounds a month top up that gives you a month of 'no surprises' roaming from the day you call the help desk (as opposed to a single billing period).
This could certainly have a short term impact on the bottom line of a provider who decides to go with it, but the long term benefits to that carrier in terms of increased subscriber numbers, reduced churn and a big PR boost in the press would seem to make it a winner.
In battle, whoever controls the high ground has a good chance of winning the battle. With so many mobile operators sharing the same ground, maybe it's time for one of them to strike out, get some distance, and make a real difference.
Ewan Spence, All About Symbian, 4 July 2008