Data Caps, what's all the fuss about?

I was sat on the train this evening, on my way back from work, listening to one of my favourite tech podcasts, and one of the presenters told a tale about contacting his network about his account and being informed about a data cap on his account that he knew nothing about. He had a 500mb limit and never knew, when he asked about his use, hew was told that 300-400mb was his average.

I work for o2 in the UK, and we were one of the first networks to introduce data restrictions and some of our customers, me included, were not happy.



We timed our new reduced data with the launch of the iPhone 4, and back then I thought it was a mistake, but it would seem that I was completely wrong, and I don't mind admitting it!


Not only have most of the major network operators in the UK followed suite and capped their customers use also, it would seem that almost everyone severely over estimates their data use.

I remember lots of customers complaining that 500mb is not enough, " I am a power user", " I'm always connected" and " I need unlimited data".



As we got more used to the idea that data was being capped and we began to look at customers use, It became clear that 500mb wasplenty of data for almost everyone, in fact, o2 told us that leading up to the restriction, network studies showed that average use was about 200mb. I saw evidence of this on several customers phones when checking their iPhones data usage counters, the difference between what they thought they used and what they actually used was huge!

Perhaps we need to understand more about our phones and how we use them, most of our iPhone customers had no clue that their phones actually tracked data usage, ( reminds me of the iphone4 v evo video clip) except the customer keeps asking for unlimited data.



So far I have met 1 person through my work who regally uses more than 500mb, and I meet a lot of our customers everyday, so I guess data caps aren't as important as they seem.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg&feature=youtube_gdata_player


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