The cost of 3G....

This is an excerpt from an article written by Kerlyn G. Bautista from yesterday's edition of BusinessWorld entitled: Globe, Digital Mobile alloting outlay for 3G rollout program.



Globe will start offering 3G services by next year and will extend the offering to cities and municipalities that shelter 98% of the Filipino population in the next five years.

It plans to charge P40 per minute of call over 3G network, P40 for video conferencing, P5 per kilobyte of internet content accessed over the mobile phone, P10 per kilobyte of content streamed from the internet, P20 per kilobyte of network games, P40 per minute of video sharing, and P100 per download of large files like games and videos.



Image hosting by PhotobucketMan, I was expecting 3G services to be expensive, but not this expensive. Assuming this article to be accurate, 3G calls would at least six times more expensive than regular (voice only) GSM calls and at least 33 times more expensive than internet browsing via regular GPRS. At these rates, it would be more cost effective to simply rely on broadband equipped PCs, or to browse the internet when mobile using older, slower, but cheaper 2.5 or 2.75G technology (GPRS or EDGE).

Somehow, I have my doubts regarding the rates given. I think that they are just too high for the service to gain any significant market penetration. Yeah, I know 3G is significantly faster, but currently I pay only P0.10-P0.15 per KB downloaded from the internet via GPRS/EDGE, which is really no slouch (53.2 to 80 kbps) if you're only downloading email or news reports. While video calls, video conferencing and video sharing as well as a plethora of new multimedia content are tempting reasons to move up to 3G, I'm not really willing to pay that significantly high of a premium for it, at least not now.

If this pricing scheme is true, 3G will remain nothing more than a niche service that only a minority will be able to afford. Of course, most new technologies are often expensive at first, only to lower its prices later on as it makes inroads in the consumer market and as the cost of the technology decreases.

Well, it's still too early to say. Let's see what happens in the next few months or so.

3G promises a whole new world of communication and connectivity.

Let's just hope we will be able to afford it.

Comments

Ronald Allan said…
Yeah, it's too early to tell. :-) Let see what happens.

I take it you're a Sun fan? :-)
February 02, 2006 4:39 PM
Anonymous said…
Well said dude. Para sa akin, 3G stands for "Tripleng Gastos!"
February 03, 2006 1:38 AM
Ronald Allan said…
Not just triple it seems, but 2 to 10 times triple. :-)

*sigh*
February 03, 2006 8:40 AM
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