MocoNews today picked up an interesting story on Orange having cut a deal with Facebook and MySpace for free browsing on those sites for their prepaid users. According to the article, by giving access to those sites for free data cost, Orange is trying to attract more users to their mobile portal.I think this is a move in the right direction from a carrier: riding on the success of a company they cannot fight but rather support and try to extract some juice out of it for their own efforts. It requires the rare notion from a carrier to recognize that they themselves would not represent the center of the world. Well done! I would be curious to know what the deal terms look like.This is also a move handset vendors like Nokia have a harder time to counter – they don’t have data carriage to give away.This is a competitive measure that works in building a business, not for sustaining it. It also works mainly on prepaid-heavy market such as in Europe – not so well in the US were users have a subscription relationship and where users will probably pick up unlimited data plans at an increasingly fast rate.
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Another unimaginative carrier move. Hot on the heels of Vodafone UK reducing their data tariffs to access social networking sites.
Instead of simply re-emphasising their position in the value chain as a bit-pipe provider, why don’t these carriers actually extend and enhance these services by providing Cell-ID locations for free and enabling efficient server-side plumbing to connect devices + locations to these websites.
Otherwise it will be perceived as just poorly thought-out bandwagon-jumping.
By playing around with data tariffs and access, it’s more or less saying that this is all the carriers bring to the social networking party. That may be. But there is an opportunity to integrate ubiquitous and cheap location (no GPS in sight) to improve these services. Cell-ID is good enough for what is predominantly an urban phenomenon. If other carriers don’t follow, this could even be a reason for staying with a particular carrier.
Hi Tapio !
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