Where's Wireless Data for the Rest of Us?
Enough with ring tones--phones can do a lot more.
ARPU: It sounds vaguely unpleasant, but it happens to be the mobile phone industry's favorite metric of success. It stands for Average Revenue Per User, which in English translates to AMAWCGOCTFO: "As Much as We Can Get Our Customers to Fork Over."
As prices for voice service decline, carriers see increased ARPU in cheesy gimcracks like "cool" ring tones that can annoy dozens of people at a time, "fun" ring-back tones that remind your caller you are truly a person without a life, and "useful" data services that can deliver sports scores but not your e-mail.
ARPU also grows from pricey computer data plans that require a separate account and a PC Card for your notebook, despite the fact that the upscale phone in your pocket would work fine as a wireless modem. Even when they'll sell you an all-you-can-eat data plan for your phone, carriers generally try to protect their higher-cost PC-data offerings.
Now that mobile phones are computers that happen to have smaller screens and keyboards, handsets and services seem stuck in an either/or world. If you're a kid bent on wasting all of your allowance on fashion statements and teensy games, or a businessperson willing to ransack corporate funds to pay costly data fees, you can find the right plan and phone.
But I want to use my phone as a modem for my laptop, and I don't want to pay a fortune. June Fabrics' PdaNet, which I've mentioned here before, just works: The software turns your Windows Mobile or Palm phone into a modem for your notebook, typically via a USB cable but also through Bluetooth. Carriers--who want to keep you as a potential customer for a separate PC Card and plan--don't sell PdaNet, making this application something you have to locate and use in a sort of data underground.
Now, though, there's good news for people like me who need laptop data access when we travel but aren't willing to spend hundred of dollars a year for high-speed service that we won't use much and that isn't yet offered everywhere. We need the ability to maintain a cheap low-speed plan and order up superfast service for a day or a week at a price that won't break the bank. And Verizon is the first carrier to respond, with
That's great--and for me, it's far more valuable than other new services carriers are promoting, such as location-based programs that can tell you exactly where to find the nearest pizza parlor. When I'm at home, I know where the pizza place is, and when I'm on the road, I'm not likely to trust anybody who suggests fourth-rate chain restaurants. Then there's TV on a phone: It may be a useful time-killer, but the content is still Springsteen's "57 channels and nothing on."
Ultimately, wireless phones are still about communication, whether you're making a voice call, looking at e-mail, or digging up information on the Web. If other carriers follow Verizon's lead and stop playing games with our data, there will be only one thing that can bring communication to a halt: the doggone short-lived battery.
Stephen Manes
