Why Andrew Bud of mBlox is no fan of unlimited data plans

By on July 24, 2007 in News

David Murphy of Mobile Marketing Magazine has done an interesting interview featuring Andrew Bud of mBlox discussing mobile data. Andrew firmly believes that the mobile operators haven’t quite got the right strategy with their all-you-can-eat data plans at 5 or 10 pounds per month.

I think they’ve got it right from a consumer perspective. I like it. But I certainly see Andrew’s perspective.

Link: Mobile Marketing Magazine: Food for Thought about All You Can Eat

On the PC Internet, ISPs saw broadband – all you can eat data by any other name – as the answer to their problems, so mobile operators are going down the same route. But as Bud explained in great detail, the mobile Internet is not the PC Internet. 

Check out David’s piece at the link above for more.

About Ewan

Ewan is Founder and Editor of Mobile Industry Review. He writes about a wide variety of industry issues and is usually active on Twitter most days. You can read more about him or reach him with these details.
View all posts by Ewan →

  • Mike

    Good grief – could you *get* any more ‘but he would say that, wouldn’t he’?

    Some points: yes, the mobile internet doesn’t scale – just like the fixed internet doesn’t. Actually, nothing scales when taken to extremes (like drainage networks, but that’s a different soaking-wet Cotswolds village).

    The fact is, most MNO’s currently have a huge amount of capacity – not at peak commuting times, but otherwise, tons. At the same time as devices are getting smarter, and content like YouTube is being mobilised, the networks are getting smarter/faster/denser as well. HSPA this year. Even faster HSPA next year.

    2010 is less than 3 years away, and that’s when 3GPP LTE – Long Term Evolution – networks, the true ’4G’ ones, should make an appearance. These are an Evolution of current 3/3.5G, not something completely new like WiMAX). (VC cronies, chant after me: Evolution, not Revolution. Death to WiMAX ;-)

    LTE: think 100Mbps theoretical maximum to the handset. That is eye-wateringly fast. Like, 3 minute music or news video in the blink of an eye fast.

    I have 8Mbps ADSL to my home, 2 laptops on the interweb anytime we like, running a family website with loads of images/movies, a streaming audio device (Squeezebox) delivering internet radio on demand for hours a day (love that BBC Listen Again!) and yet I *barely touch* 1GB of traffic a month. I can watch full-screen IPTV at 1Mbps just fine. Hell, I can plug my N95 into an LCD projector and watch Slingbox over a 220kpbs 3G bearer and it looks OK at 70″ wide!

    Now I must be well beyond the normal use case here. Anyone who bases their predictions on hordes of BitTorrenting and P2P DVD sharing is just showing thier insular view of how most people really behave. Yes, if everyone changed to Joost tomorrow, we’d be fu*ked. But that’s not going to happen. The BBC’s iPlayer has IPTV right – tricklecast at the lowest QoS priority, early in the am.

    So when anyone tells me that the mobile internet is going to hoist itself by its own flat-rate petard, I just look at what I need now, what capacity I *might* need in future, and what I *know* the future will deliver. All up, there’s no trainwreck coming….just bewdiful, jaw-dropping fastness and 0.5ms latency :-)

    Cheers,

    Mike

  • http://www.whatleydude.vox.com James Whatley

    I’ll drink to that Mike!

    Hahaha – great response.

  • john

    “…and 0.5ms latency”

    Are you sure about that?

  • Mike

    I sit corrected – 3GPP target is 5ms for small packets (like presence info).

    What’s a factor of ten beween friends eh?

  • Ed

    Good points from Mike – although the problem with this is the speeds quoted for LTE (and indeed HSPA) are only from the Node B (base station) to the phone (and indeed per sector not per user). To actually get that kind of speeds for data is going to require a massive upgrade in operator backhaul networks and this is where the real crux of the issue lies.

    Providing even partial upgrades is going to represent a massive cost headache for operators and the bottleneck effectively just shifts one hop upstream, unless they start laying fibre to all base stations…..

  • http://www.technokitten.com technokitten

    I have the greatest respect for Andrew Bud and he really knows his onions when it comes to things mobile. And he’s done incredibly well growing mblox into the success it is today. However, call me a skeptic, but this looks like another thinly veiled sales pitch for mblox’s ‘sender pays’ product which he’s been touting for the last couple of years or so. And every time I hear him speak at any public event, he always manages to sneak in a pitch for the service. This looks like another one to me.

    And thanks Mike for the technical insight.

Switch to our mobile site