When mobile companies say that there isn’t much of a market for the whole mobile browsing experience, it really isn’t that hard to figure out why that might be - I just saw a Bell Mobility ad in the paper with a $20 plan that included something called “Mobile Browser Lite” - a whopping 100Kb per month of data, with a 5 cent per 100Kb charge for overage. Wow. That means that you could read this blog 3 times a month on your phone for no additional charge! Yeah, that’ll get them screaming for the service, all right…
This reminds me of Bell’s lame WiFi experiment. They picked two pilot locations for a free hotspot. The first was at Union Station in Toronto, which wasn’t a bad idea, except that they put it somewhere where there weren’t many seats (and most people were commuters where were really near their internet-powered workplaces), and the other was at some park in Kingston, Ontario. There was some usage (there weren’t many hotspots available at the time, and certainly not many free ones), but amazingly, once they started charging for it, demand dropped off.
Bell Marketing is awesome. I bet they could find a way to prove that there’s no demand for free money.
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