* Advocates that carriers alert users before they incur overages
The Federal Communications Commission wants to make sure that mobile users are aware of how much wireless network usage they consume so they can avoid those unexpected end-of-the month charges that so often rear their ugly heads.
The agency issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) earlier this month that would require mobile service operators to alert wireless subscribers before they exceed the voice, text and data limits imposed by their mobile plans. The spirit of the NPRM — out for comment until Nov. 14 — is reminiscent of AT&T’s decision to alert subscribers when they reach 65%, 90% and 100% of their data usage caps for the month.
AT&T shifts to usage-based data plans
That alerting decision came about when AT&T introduced tiered, usage-based data pricing with no more unlimited options in June.
AT&T’s move to include the alerts was generally received favorably; it was considered necessary to educate subscribers about their behavior with data usage caps in force. Many users accustomed to “minutes of usage” have trouble understanding what constitutes a megabyte of usage, making it easy to unwittingly overshoot the data usage cap and rack up overage charges.
It’s rumored that other U.S. carriers will soon follow AT&T in its usage-based pricing model. The appeal of imposing data limits is to help carriers avoid the network congestion and resulting service degradation that can occur when some subscribers hog capacity.
It’s been reported that Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile will soon introduce tiered data plans. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has said publicly that the carrier has no concrete plans to implement tiered data pricing but admitted a recent conference that he’s not ruling it out, either.
The FCC NPRM is aimed to aid consumers, not enterprises. However, if the agency is successful at getting carriers to alert consumers, it’s presumed they will likely do so for enterprise customers, too.
