23 July 2010 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

UK retailers cost mobile internet users dearly with new data policy

Mobile phone retailers such as O2, Phones4U, Vodafone, etc, should be regarded as the catalysts to the birth of mobile internet in the United Kingdom. The likes of O2 made Apple's groundbreaking but pricey iPhone accessible to Joe Public - with this company, and now a handful of others, consumers can get a £400 mobile phone for £35 per month with unlimited call and data usage plans.

However, O2 and some other UK retailers have followed suit with AT&T, the iPhone's sole US contract provider, on implementing a data usage cap. No longer will internet data usage on mobile phones be "unlimited" - if it ever was - with caps from 500MB to 1GB having been set.

If you exceed 500MB, you have to pay additional fees for browsing. This cap initially seems reasonable - it's a lot of access. O2 markets it as around 1,000 emails with an image attachment - but how does this apply to regular browsing?


Is 500MB Enough?

Using mobile commerce as an example, most retailers have yet to develop mobile versions of their websites, meaning the size of the rich components (HTML, CSS, images, etc) that make up each webpage have been optimised for desktop broadband connections with data usage limits much higher than 500MB.


Costing You Money

Mobile users on the new 500MB data usage policy looking to purchase products with 12 of the UK's biggest retailers will rapidly eat away at their limited data usage cap while browsing their websites. This could sour the deal on mobile internet commerce, as if you exceed the limit you have to pay increased tariffs for the additional access.

Bigmouthmedia analysed the components that make up the websites Argos, B&Q, Currys, Dixons, Halfords, John Lewis, M&M Direct, Marks & Spencer, Next, ScrewFix, Toys R Us and WH Smith to find the following file sizes:



The average file size among these retailers is just under 1MB at 908KB. The largest files came from ScrewFix at 2.6MB and the lowest from Marks & Spencer, the only retailer which appear to have a mobile version of its website, at 38KB (1/69th of ScrewFix).

Using the average file size and applying the math, in theory, users inevitably get around 500 visits when accessing the analysed retailers' websites on their mobile phone - an alarmingly low figure (16 visits/day).

That figure also excludes other popular activities such as downloading applications and music or watching streaming video. With the new limit, consumers will need to be more mindful as to how they use their mobile internet access, or expect an inflated contract bill in the post.

Thinking to the future - it would be fair to suggest that only a small percentage of the UK has a smartphone and frequently browse the internet on their mobiles - these figures are expected to increase; might the 500MB data usage also increase to meet capacities?

With the recession, it may not be financially viable for mobile providers to simply enable higher levels. Just like the broadband 'crisis', if everyone's connected at 18:00, the connection quality drops.

With the development of a mobile commerce not accelerating as fast as the demand, and new limits around data usage, we can conclude that users may end up paying extra to visit their favourite retailers.

We'll give Google credit and suggest they saw this coming by putting pressure on websites to reduce their web page load times. Looks like that one per cent of queries Google claims this ranking factor applies to may get a whole lot bigger and more prominent as time progresses.

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