My parents have a similar relationship with tea to that which Hemingway had with ethanol. So, I feel a bit guilty having bought them a new, fancy kettle for Christmas. It’s a bit like buying your aunt Edith a pin cushion, when you know she’s an intravenous heroin addict. Functionally appropriate, but of dubious wisdom. Anyhow, we had to make a side-trip up to Harrods in London yesterday to find one that really was worthy of giftdom. (Clue to Rowenta: you’ll get blogospheric links when you stop hiding your merchandise behind a useless Flash site, and give every product a URL.)
Now, Harrods is in Knightsbridge, which is about a mile and a half from Oxford Street where most of the big department stores are situated. We had travelcards, giving us unlimited access to buses and tube trains. So we just hopped on the 137 bus, and headed off. Whilst on my bus, I whipped out my smartphone, and quickly googled “harrods opening hours” to check we weren’t going to arrive too late.
I’m a scrooge, so we’re with Tesco Mobile. Cheap calls, expensive data. They charge £4/Mb for WAP GPRS (and don’t offer generic Internet GPRS at all). So a few big, heavy normal web pages delivered to my mobile cost me about £1.80 (roughtly US$3.15). Now, I knew it was going to be expensive — I was doing it as much for the experiment as the practical value. But I was shocked at how bad it turned out to be. “Mobile web” pages that are 1/10 the size may be economically practical, but “real web” pages delivered to mobile handsets aren’t. Tesco don’t yet sell any smartphones, so this isn’t a reflection on their retailing wisdom. But their data prices are pretty similar to the other pre-paid operators, and only a factor of 2 or so higher than typical post-paid plan prices.
Likewise, whilst on the train into London with my wife, we were chatting about what to do the next day, and as a joke I suggested we take the Eurostar train to Paris for a day trip. Whip out phone to check the price… The Eurostar web site is a disaster, as it happens. (I tried using it in Firefox on my parents’ Mac mini last night, and it just doesn’t work!) It certainly fails to work in Opera on a smartphone. But it cost me over £2 just to get to the point of the booking page where the drop-down boxes don’t work.
The irony of this is that the mobile operator has gone to knowing effort to cut me off from real Internet access, and force me to browse via their proxy gateway. Yet despite having full access to my activities, they haven’t delivered an appropriate value-based pricing. Does anyone else see the irony? I don’t get ten times the value from a badly-coded heavy web page that can’t be bothered to check the user agent string and deduce it’s being delivered to a mobile phone. The dream of IMS et al is value-based price discrimination, yet with all the technological tools in place they aren’t doing it yet on today’s services! There’s an opportunity here for someone to steal the mobile browsing market by making the pricing a more predictable per-page amount.
UPDATE: How about this for an idea: price web access on a “per domain” basis. OK, some people could try to set up proxies to get around that, but the general masses won’t.
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