Well after a long wait, we brought you EE’s 4G price plans as soon as they were announced and… well its fair to say the response hasn’t been universal acclaim, due almost entirely to the thorny issue of data allowances.
PC Pro have managed to get an interview with EE’s Chief Marketing Officer Pippa Dunn and put some of the concerns people have raised directly to her.
There’s a link below to the full interview, so I’ll just paraphrase here, but the jist is EE think their pricing is correct because on their 3G network “most people only use 380MB a month”. Hmmm, so that new increase in data speed won’t tempt people to download more then?
When questioned about T-Mobile’s “Full Monty” tariff, sold as “unlimited”, Pippa revealed the average data usage was 1.5GB for Full Monty customers, which on EE’s new tariff, if data consumption remained the same, would suddenly cost £46 a month.
I’ll be honest, it doesn’t sound that tempting to me!
But what do you think?
Link – PC Pro EE interview
load of rubbish
It’s good to see that the data packages are based on the two networks customer’s usage. That said, the intention of LTE is not only for faster downloading of data but to also persuade you to download more because it is easier, faster, more suitable, etc, etc… As such the pricing element is still wrong and EE’s intention appears clear: we’ll make our money first from a monopoly position and then, as customers download more, we’ll make more money through the add-on fees.
It doesn’t look like it puts the customer first and it’s a short-sighted viewpoint. They have the opportunity to capture the market for a new, premium service but still cling to business and marketing policies of the 1990s. A shame, but I suspect that people will vote for 3G+ services at a lower cost and preferential data packages – speed of download is not the only factor.
Either that or they don’t think anyone will go for it, and they’re pricing for failure. Strange strategy if true! Or put a more realistic way, their maximum possible population will initially be small while they roll out, so they have to up the prices.
Either way its a poor customer experience.