Bill Shock Complaints Push Operators into Action
Monday, June 25th, 2012 Steve Livingston, Sr. Vice President of Carrier Development
GSMA member operators meeting this week committed to making mobile data roaming charges easier to understand and more transparent, in an effort to calm the waters with subscribers experiencing bill shock after travel. The twenty-four operators signing on the plan represent over 400 million subscribers worldwide.
These mobile operators are taking a big step forward by making data roaming charges easier to understand as well as setting up protection from accidentally running high mobile data bills, but the consumer is still being put on a diet when traveling abroad. Consumers are growing more dependent on their digital and connected lives and want to access the same applications and content when they travel as when they are at home. Increasingly, subscribers have become so dependent on this connection that access has migrated from a desire to a necessity, for both business and personal reasons.
There will be some carrier disrupters that will provide the consumer with this obvious benefit, and those carriers will quickly reap the benefits from these high valued customers as well as their families. A further step that will distinguish these operators from their competitors is taking advantage of services such as iPass Open Mobile Exchange. Tapping into rapidly growing global Wi-Fi availability will allow carriers to support their subscribers more cost-effectively for data hungry applications, benefiting both the consumer and the operator.
Tags: 3G offload, bill shock, carriers, cost management, mobile operators, roaming, wi-fi access
