Plea for real-time mobile meter

Helping users to be accountable for their cellular charges

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

Since usage-based mobile pricing is likely in our future, something we could all probably use is real-time visibility into our cellular consumption levels.

Today, the major U.S. carriers do allow you to look online to check your month-to-date voice and data totals. This is theoretically helpful for heavy bandwidth users that, while they may have an "unlimited" mobile data plan for about $45 a month within the United States, might find themselves penalized with extra charges if they exceed a carrier's typical 5GB-per-month data cap.

However, there is lag time in the status of these usage updates. The lags can be as long as 24 hours, which renders the tool far less useful. Particularly when enterprise workers are traveling, they are likely to be using lots of bandwidth in condensed amounts of time -- during meetings, presentations and so forth. If a big chunk of usage doesn't show up on the meter for 24 hours, the user might unwittingly exceed the data cap by the time yesterday's usage is recorded.

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Since usage-based mobile pricing is likely in our future, something we could all probably use is real-time visibility into our cellular consumption levels.

Today, the major U.S. carriers do allow you to look online to check your month-to-date voice and data totals. This is theoretically helpful for heavy bandwidth users that, while they may have an "unlimited" mobile data plan for about $45 a month within the United States, might find themselves penalized with extra charges if they exceed a carrier's typical 5GB-per-month data cap.

However, there is lag time in the status of these usage updates. The lags can be as long as 24 hours, which renders the tool far less useful. Particularly when enterprise workers are traveling, they are likely to be using lots of bandwidth in condensed amounts of time -- during meetings, presentations and so forth. If a big chunk of usage doesn't show up on the meter for 24 hours, the user might unwittingly exceed the data cap by the time yesterday's usage is recorded.

It is difficult for the carriers to offer very up-to-date usage levels, I'm told, because usage gets reported through traditional operation support systems oriented toward after-the-fact billing. However, there may be help coming from the mobile device management companies such as Tangoe and MobileIron, which put client agent software on user' mobile devices.

Given that the client reports information directly to an enterprise mobility server where updates are immediately recorded and available for user access, these companies are perhaps better positioned for delivering real-time usage and expense management tools than their carrier counterparts.

Read more about wireless & mobile in Network World's Wireless & Mobile section.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.