O2 makes iPhone bandwidth truly unlimited
Published by on November 6th, 2007
We have seen buzz hotting up in the UK leading up to the iPhone’s release at the end of this week. Competing news positive and negative news stories abound and other phone manufacturers release TV ads which are clearly deliberately targeted at those considering an iPhone. Coming back at them all is O2’s announcement that they are scrapping bandwidth capping for iPhone accounts, making it the first UK network to offer truly unlimited data transfer.
Previously all “unlimited” data deals, much like so many broadband services, held a “fair usage” policy, enabling the supplier to pull the plug should an account’s usage reach a certain threshold - surely there’s got to be some issue in using the term “unlimited” in that case. O2’s original plans for the iPhone was a service limited to 200M per month on a fair usage clause, which was actually lower than many services offered by competitors. The Telegraph broke the news at the weekend, quoting O2 as stating that they were reacting to feedback from potential iPhone users that any amount of capping was unacceptable.
According to O2 Chief Executive, Matthew Key, users “find ‘unlimited with limits’ confusing, plus most people don’t speak in megabits or understand what they equate to”. Seems customers aren’t the only ones confused as this article mentions megabits, others mention megabytes - not surprising O2 foresaw problems, though this is undoubtedly more about unique services to give O2 that additional edge over the competition. There’s one caveat on the unlimited usage, however, you can only use it for personal, non-commercial web access/email/etc.. So no picking up your work emails then? I’d love to know how they are going to monitor it.
It’s a good move, and if I didn’t have to carry around a work phone and iPhone was available on Orange, and I had £269 quid to spare right now… well, you know.
