Zero-rental GPRS

Posted on | August 18, 2006 |

I’m always pleased to see favourable developments in the uptake of data services. The ubiquitous internet-ready mobile phone has the potential to be the laptop of developing countries like India. We have to move beyond Voice and SMS; for this operators have to bring down the cost of entry and usage, and the content / service providers have to make it compelling for the users.

Hutch Mumbai introduced a zero-rental GPRS plan in June this year, waiving off a monthly rental of Rs 49 and keeping a pay-per-use charge of 10 paise per 10 kilobytes. So if you use 1MB of data while browsing and downloading stuff, it would cost you Rs 10.

Now Airtel Chennai has also introduced a zero-rental GPRS service for its post-paid customers at pay-per-use rate of Re 1 per 100 kilobytes. Which works out to Rs 10 per 1MB.

There are two ways the GPRS service is used.

• On-PC browsing: The mobile is used as a modem for laptops and PCs
• On-Phone browsing: Browsing and downloading happens on the mobile browser

For on-phone browsing, the amount of data downloaded from the mobile web is comparatively not very high. This is because the web pages, graphics and downloads are optimized in size to suit the slower speeds and smaller screens, and are compressed by the WAP gateway.

A pay per use model will lower the monthly cost for most users as there is no minimum commitment. Another advantage is that users can feel free to try out things and evaluate the mobile web without having to commit a one-time entry fee. The monthly rental acts as a hurdle to acceptance of the service since most users can’t imagine its value to shell out that fee. Provided that there are compelling content and services, this can spur usage as many more users will be willing to experiment with GPRS. It can be a positive feedback loop, in which as more users start using GPRS - more content and services are created for it and so on.

Zero-rental GPRS is a welcome move by these operators and I hope their experiment in these circles succeeds to spread to all other circles and operators.

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