:The Flash Advancer

What is Mobile Broadband really for? This is a question you should not even ask the operator. They do not have the answer. In a few weeks, a new tool, guy, will be launched, that will help mobile operators decipher precisely what their customers are using broadband for. It is a mystery that these operators charge their customers for using the service, yet they have little or no idea of what the customers are doing. How then do they know how to fix the price? One could say that the pricing plan has no basis, and is senseless.

An analyst stated that there has been an explosion of mobile broadband in the past 6 months, but there is no bottom line. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) seem to be focused on providing narrowband voice and SMS amidst the fast changing network traffic. The volume of data traffic is leading voice traffic by a wide margin, as reported by T-Mobile. Other Mobile Broadband Operators are expected to announce a similar change. In the six months preceding March 2008, 3 UK said they experienced an increase in data traffic that was ten times that of voice traffic.

This indicates that the operators have more 3G capacity than what phone customers could make use of. The excess capacity is being sold to laptop users, but it is not clear whether this is being done at a profit.