In today’s environment, what you really want is the customer’s money, every month, like clockwork. You can make a lot more cash out of the customer in other ways, for example up-selling smart services or taking a cut of other transactions. Of course, when you’re entire operation is obsessing over how to take an extra twenty pence from me for a particular phone call, they’re not bothering focusing on taking tens of pounds in revenue from other activities.

All operators know this. They know they’re spunking their efforts up against the wall, most of the time. Witness, for example, the numerous industry executives I meet regularly telling me that they’ve no flipping clue what voice revenues they’re going to make this year. Yup. What they do know is that the majority of consumers are doing their level best to stick-one-in-the-eye of the finance bods and be very, very careful about what they do with their phones, so as not to overpay.

Why not stop fighting with the consumer? Why not zero-rate everything for a fixed monthly fee on a 24-month contract? Then at least the finance bods can relax and you can then focus on creating added value services that add significantly to the revenue?

Well that’s what T-Mobile has announced this morning.

It’s called The Fully Monty — and yes, it is absolutely unlimited everything. And before I go into detail, I should point out that this is potentially hugely damaging to Three. We’ll get to that in a moment.

There are four price ‘brackets’ thus:

As you can see there, at £36/month, you’ll get 2,000 minutes to other networks and a fairly good deal on the key smartphone offerings. Beyond £36, it’s now about how much you want to pay up-front for your handset. For an extra £5, you can advance to unlimited everything. And if you jump to £61/month, the 32GB iPhone 4S is free — and it’s just £29 for the 64GB.

Now then. It’s not truly ‘unlimited everything’. No. The finance bods obviously stuck their pins into Ben Fritsch, T-Mobile’s Head of Propositions, preventing him from zero-rating calls to number ranges such as 0800, 0808, 0845 and so on. They’re still a bollock-crushing 40 pence a minute. A FLIPPING MINUTE! And if you’re calling Jersey, that stlll-doesn’t-count.

However let’s stay positive.

Finally, one of the top operators in the UK has decided to dump the “minutes”. For quite a while, unlimited texts has been a popular add-on for most price plans, but usually you’ve had to pick and choose your ‘add-ons’ to try and get, for example, unlimited landline calls, but only 200 cross-network calls. It’s made the whole price plan decision process a bit annoying for everyone for the last decade.

It’s a landmark gesture to just make it all (or, most of it) unlimited.

I think this will appeal to quite a lot of contract customers.

Let’s hear from Mr Fritsch of T-Mobile:

The Full Monty has been designed for customers who want the peace of mind that there are absolutely no limits placed on their allowances, whilst also knowing they’re getting market leading value for money. We believe our Pay Monthly portfolio offers plans to suit anyone’s needs, all at accessible prices – and we’re really proud to be the first to offer a plan like The Full Monty in the UK”.

And for those of you reading, wondering whether there’s a fair-use policy on the data? There isn’t. Here are the words direct from T-Mobile’s release:

Customers signing up to The Full Monty 24 month plan will not only have the reassurance that there are no caps on their calls, texts and internet, they will also have access to unlimited WiFi, and can use their mobile internet for whatever they like – including tethering (using a smartphone as an internet connection for a laptop or tablet), streaming and downloading.

And here, for the sake of clarity, are the little footnotes:

Minutes and texts unlimited allowance apply to all UK mobile networks, voicemail and numbers beginning with 01, 02, 03 (excluding Jersey, Guernsey and Isle of Man). Calls to 08 (including 0870) or 070 numbers are premium rate numbers and excluded from your inclusive allowances. Calls to 0800, 0808, 0845 and other 08 numbers cost 40p/min. See www.t-mobile.co.uk/help&support/priceplans. Picture messages are not included within the allowance.

The Full Monty plan provides access to our preferred WiFi partner’€™s WiFi network; presently this is BT Openzone network excluding any sites providing access to any organisation or location which is part of the Olympic Games in London in 2012. The BT Openzone terms can be found at www.btopenzone.com/terms-and-conditions/index.jsp

So, this is good news. It’s about time we had this kind of action from the big operator groups in the UK. I’m interested to see just how long Vodafone will be able to cling-on to their “minutes” obsession as a result.

But there’s a few issues to consider.

First, T-Mobile and Orange have 28 million customers in the UK. Yes, their networks are shared, but just how well can they support data? Is this likely to turn into a One2One-style free-evening-and-weekend-calls arrangement whereby yes, it’s unlimited, but you can’t actually *access* the network because of congestion? That’s going to be interesting to see.

Second, if you’re paying a metered £1 or £2 per megabyte for data on T-Mobile, you’re hardly likely to react very well to other people paying ‘nothing’ but sitting on the internet watching iPlayer from their handsets all day, “cos it’s free”, especially if your data speeds go from good to super-slow.

I suppose that by limiting the spend to £36+/month, T-Mobile will be hoping to avoid the yoof community who are likely to spend a lot of time doing this.

Third, I worry for Three.

Their whole marketing campaign and message has been about their “The One” plan which has been trampled all over by today’s announcement. There’s still some juice in Three’s offer (their plan starts at £25/month, 2,000 minutes, 5,000 texts with unlimited data). For instance, the company’s “Text 500″ plan comes with 500 minutes, 5,000 texts and 1GB of data. For £2 more on T-Mobile, you can get everything unlimited. This is a bit of an arse for Three.

I trust the rest of the UK operator community will now sit up and start dusting off the “what happens when someone else does unlimited, properly” strategy plans.

Good work T-Mobile.

Meanwhile, if Ben Fritsch and his team could see their way to introducing TMOGOLD (full details here), I’d be even more delighted.

I have to say I’m sorely tempted to try out XCom Global’s latest offering. They can now offer you unlimited data via MiFi (or USB stick) for a thoroughly reasonable $14.95 per day across a phenomenal 195 countries (up from 67 previously).

There’s no charge for the equipment and delivery is (generally free if you order 10 days prior to departure).

MiFis are $14.95/day and USB sticks are $12.95/day.

It’s a really, really smart idea.

As an illustration (and assuming you’re British), if you went to the US from the 20th to 27th of January (that’s a rental period of 8 days), XCom Global would charge you $14.95 per day bringing the total costs to $119.60.

Now.

Let’s have a wee think.

$119 is £76. You’d already be spending £5 per day on the likes of Vodafone to get 25mb usage. That’s £40 for the trip so far. So for an extra £36, you could use XCom’s service and actually use ‘unlimited’ data rather than having to be very careful about your activities.

Or, if you’re going to Mobile World Congress and you’d like unlimited data on a MiFi unit there for the duration of the show, you’d pay XCom Global just $59.80 for the privilege — a thoroughly reasonable £38. Ben and I spent more than this arsing around in the Vodafone Spain shop in Barcelona last year.

I don’t think there’s a better alternative. You could obviously get a local SIM — but that’s wholly inconvenient on quite a few counts. NONE of the SIMs I bought from the Vodafone Spain shop worked for more than 5 minutes because the guy in the shop didn’t quite understand what we said when we POINTED at the UNLIMITED DATA PREPAY offer. I burnt through my €20 credit in about 5 minutes. If you don’t want that hassle then I can’t see why you wouldn’t check out the likes of XCOM Global.

Another viewpoint: Your operator will probably offer you a fairly decent European roaming deal — £5 or £2 per day for 20-25mb of usage. This might be fine if you’re on holiday but if you’re at Mobile World Congress, the chances are you’ll have some high roaming requirements.

Yeah. More and more I’m thinking this might be a highly sensible choice for many readers.

What I would like to see is some kind of permanent offer, e.g. buy the MiFi from us for $200 and then when you need to use the service, just pay $15 per day. Something like that? I’d like one device that I could keep in my pocket and use wherever I was — a little bit like ABroadband (but without the per-megabyte fees).

Other things to consider with XCOM Global —  you’ll probably want to think about insurance. If you lose the device, you’ll need to cough up a rather shocking $800. That is very painful. If you’re paying their $3.95 insurance the loss charge is $160. Don’t lose it, bottom line.

XCom Global won’t be suitable for every use case but I think it’s got serious merits. There’s a lot more information on their site.

Update: Here’s a contribution from reader Ilicco who’s currently (at time of writing) on vacation in Byron Bay, Australia — and roaming (as per his comment below) at phenomenally good rates.

We have a chance – let’s kill ‘unlimited’ once and for all

The word ‘unlimited’ has been abused too much and too long by telecoms companies to be rehabilitated. It should be killed off now we have a chance.

via Opinion: We have a chance – let’s kill ‘unlimited’ once and for all | Wireless Worker.

What do you think? I reckon he makes a very good set of points, particularly around defining related terms like ‘fair use’.

Have a good weekend…

For fun, let’s remind ourselves of the definition of ‘unlimited’:

un-lim-it-ed [adjective]

1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.

Wow… Infinite, unrestricted data… no conditions?  For 30p a day?  That’s not bad.

But let’s check the small print:

Fair Use Policy: [snip] …subject to a fair use allowance of 25MB per day. If your usage exceeds this amount then we reserve the right to charge you for the excessive element of your usage at the per MB data rate for your tariff outlined in our Tariff Table. Unlimited use is within the UK and is for your personal, non-commercial use only. It doesn’t include making internet phone or video calls, peer to peer file sharing, using your phone as a modem… [snip]

So let’s recap:

1. It’s 25MB per day.
2. You won’t be warned if you exceed ‘fair use’ and may be charged immediately at full price (about £2 per MB).
3. You can’t use it for any commercial use – so no work-related e-mail.

That feels pretty limited to me.  The 25MB alone is a disgrace…. Forget uploading more than a few pictures to Flickr, forget last.fm streaming or BBC iPlayer, don’t even try to sync a large e-mail inbox…  Normobs will easily exceed this.  And how is restricting all commercial use fair?  Does a business e-mail have a greater impact on Virgin’s network than a personal one?

Rubbish!

In my opinion this is deliberately misleading – I’m off to see if this is covered by the ASA and make a formal complaint.

Unlimited calls, texts to 3 customers and 1GB data to boot

3 last week revealed it’s to launch a new £15 unlimited calls and text tariff through stores in November.

The deal, which also includes 1GB of data, will be available for both new and eligible upgrading customers, but will not include any cross net calls to other networks.

The announcement came at a 3 press gathering in response to the network’s determination to offer consumers better packages for cross network calling but is restricted due to mobile termination rates.

Here at SMS Text News we are a big fan of of the idea of an truly unlimited plan, and it seems 3 have identified that there is a gap in this market. As Ewan would always say he would gladly pay £80 a month so he knows he gets no nasty shocks when he his bill comes.

At £15 a month I think this is a wicked deal, I have slowly been switching over my friends to 3UK onto their impressive Mix and Match plans whilst I still am on Flext T-Mobile’s version. The only sad thing about this deal is the lack of inclusion of cross network minutes, are we going back to the days where we have to convince our mates to be on the same network as us?

3UK as an operator turn me on in so many ways,  they are genuinely (in my opinion) trying to change the landscape of the industry, I mean only yesterday did we post about the new router. Not only that but can you tell me anywhere where you can still get?;

• 6 month contracts
• roaming on their sister networks and the minutes come out of your allowance
• 1gb of data for £5
• 750 Minutes and Unlimited Texts for £25 a month
• £30 credit for your and your friend for introducing them to 3
  

Reading this you would think I either work for Three or I own a lot of shares in the company. I don’t they are an operator that still excites me, and you can guarantee they are one operators I am looking to switch to when my contract runs out in December. The only one thing I feel they are lacking is the lack of Sim Only plans on a rolling month contract.

Ricky, our BlykWatch correspondent, came across this rather smart o2 viral challenge for students. 40 multiple choice questions that you have to answer as soon as possible. Get as many points as you can for your Uni and win a bucketload of iTunes and National Express vouchers.

Here’s the a pic of chap doing the competition intro:

Check the Facebook profile here.

The appeals come after Ofcom changed the controls on mobile termination rates early last year, which it said at the time would save operators £400 to £500 million a year and that saving should be passed on to retail customers.

According to The Guardian, the operators are now hoping to get termination rates down to nothing in order to be able to offer all-you-can-eat call plans of the type that have become common in the US. If that’s the case, great. If it saves the operators money, that’s great too – as long as the operators remember to send a bit of those savings our way, as Ofcom asked for.

As the FT points out, Apple wouldn’t be the first company to bundle in a music subscription with device purchases – Nokia unveiled its ‘comes with music scheme’ late last year, whereby some Nokia phones come bundled with a year of unlimited access to the company’s music store.

While it seems that Apple is only at the negotiating stage on its own plan to bundle music with the iPhone, if it goes ahead with the scheme, it’ll make a major departure for the company. Nevertheless, the promise of all you can eat music is an attractive one, so now Apple just has to find a price that consumers — not to mention the record labels — are happy to work with.