Volume caps to undermine efforts to monetise data - study

Volume caps will undermine operator efforts to monetise data by restricting market growth, according to a study by Nordic mobile data profitability specialist Rewheel. Rewheel points to their analysis made using the EU Commission's statistics on mobile broadband uptake in the member states. The consultancy took the EU statistics and marked the countries where at least one operator has been offering speed-tiered data packages instead of volume-capped offers. The correlation of mobile broadband penetration with pricing models is striking. The penetration reaches on average three times higher in the non data volume-restrictive markets. Rewheel claims they witnessed several European markets where the introduction of volume caps stopped or even reversed the initially steep mobile broadband growth, in contrast to the Rewheel's home country Finland where the market rewarded the non usage-restrictive pricing models by over 17 percent 'dongle' population penetration and a continued linear customer uptake. The consultant said that their recent independent analysis based on publicly available sources on Germany's E-Plus showed that the operator's new, low cost-base network and sizeable spectrum capacity would allow the pure mobile play telecommunication company to offer volume cap free.