It’s a big milestone for the mobile internet - At the beginning of this month, Vodafone announced some new consumer tariff plans in the UK market which include 500 MB of flat rate mobile internet access. Previously, mobile internet access was charged at a significant monthly premium. Now it’s included “free” in the standard tariff plan.

Don’t get too carried away with Vodafone’s spin on this. Vodafone users aren’t going to be queueing up to change their existing tariffs just yet. Compare the minutes and texts between these new “Vodafone best-ever value tariffs” and “Vodafone’s most popular price plans” on their UK website.

Vodafone’s “best-ever value” tariffs

Vodafone’s “most popular” price plans

I do think that this is exactly the sort of simplification step that is required to open up the mobile internet for the mass market. Mobile internet pricing has been enormously complicated and confusing for users. People are scared that if they use the mobile internet they’ll get hit with big unforeseen bills - even when they have flat rate tariffs, as one Vodafone UK user with a flat rate data card connection found out when he went to Germany and accidentally downloaded a whole episode of Friends that his wife had previously set running on his laptop in the UK – the world’s most expensive premium download at £11,000 or $22,000USD.

Mobile internet has a bright future ahead of it when operators include a big flat rate chunk of data as a standard feature of mainstream consumer contract tariffs. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of pricing in the US and in Western European markets where there is enough 3.5G infrastructure installed to enable it.

This morning, The Register reports O2’s admission that its 3G customers are limited to 128Kb/s connections - with some business users being upgraded as O2 sees fit.

“384Kb/s is the technical limit of 3G technology, without resorting to HSPDA, but topping out at 128Kb/s is something of an embarrassment for a 3G network. Not that using HSDPA will help the O2 customer, depending on the “profile” O2 has decided to assign to them they might still find themselves allocated only 128Kb/sec”, says El Reg.

In non-techy terms, this means that you’re buying a 3G phone, with the expectation of fast mobile web browsing, but in fact, you’re being limited to half the potential speed you should get.

A clever fella from the 3G.co.uk forum did a speed test on the network, getting the following speeds:

GPRS 44kbit/sec
EDGE 145kbit/sec
3G 112kbit/sec
HSDPA 124kbit/sec

I tried the tests a few times and posted the fastest. The 3G and HSDPA speeds are consistently around the times posted. The EDGE speeds were more variable, from 90 to 145kbit/sec I assume depending on cell traffic at the time.

Is it just me, or are customers not getting at all what O2 is claiming. It’s supposed to be 3G, and it ain’t doing what it says on the tin!

Granted, I’ve got an iPhone, I wouldn’t get 3G speeds anyways, but I do feel sorry for the cheeky sods who’ve been giving me a tough time for having a non-3G phone. I’m currently getting better speeds than you are if you’re also on O2!

Now, immature raspberry-blowing aside, I do hope O2 get their act together and allow non-business users to experience the full potential the network has to offer. This is a stick in the wheels of the mobile web we simply do not need.

[Update: Seems like O2 are set on making an impression on their customer base today. Did you know we’re “a bunch of geeks” and would be “muppets” for considering changing networks? Well, it seems too funny to be true, but O2 PR staff may need some coaching on locking their phone before having private conversations.

Did you hear that? Yes, it’s the sound of two PR people who are going to have a very bad end of Wednesday…]

Yesterday, I blogged about T-Mobile’s poor decision to ask Engadget Mobile to remove all traces of magenta from its branding. As Stan from Mashable says, “how, exactly, did the T’s lawyers and PR folks think Engadget will react? Humbly remove all traces of magenta from their site, issuing a big ole apology? If they did, they were wrong.”

I bow down to Engadget’s creative response. Note the header changes:

Here at Taptu, you might have noticed we’re very fond of the colour pink. We haven’t received a letter from T-Mobile, but we’ll be happy to tell them where to go if we ever do!

Join Engadget’s solidarity campaign by going pink for the day, like GearBits, Josiah Miller and Joshua Topolsky.
Read the rest of this entry »

A bit ahead of the game, Engadget Mobile released their April Fool joke last night in the form of an article reporting that Deutsche Telekom has sent them a letter asking them to stop using the colour magenta, as T-Mobile, a DT-owned company, uses it in its branding. It’s a comical attempt on Engadget’s part, but really, it’s a rather unrealistic claim. No company would be stupid enough to think they own a colour…

Oh… hold on. Sorry, I’m being told over the wire that the letter isn’t an April Fool joke at all, and that the General Manager of Weblogs Inc did receive this letter. Ahem. Well, on this note, just in case you begin to confuse the two brands, here’s a simple chart to help you out.

I mean, really, guys!

The mobile web is still only a fragment of the wider desktop web we use everyday, so one of the challenges operators, website owners and users face is how on Earth to cram this big web onto small screens.

Different people tackle the problem in different ways, as the Sender 11 blog points out:

Apple: Adapt the phone to the web.
Opera: Adapt the web to the phone.

But then, there’s a third option: Bulldoze everything with a transcoder, including sites which are already mobile, and don’t shed a tear for the casualties.

This approach has unfortunately been adopted by a number of operators, namely Vodafone and TeliaSonera with Novarra, and Sprint with OpenWave.

When I think of the carelessness these guys are exhibiting, I get a Hulk moment “Vero angry, Vero smash phones! ARGGHHHH!” It boggles the mind how Sprint can go as far as saying it’s in the customer’s best interest. If they really cared about the customer experience, they wouldn’t highjack user agents, they would acknowledge sites which are already mobile-ready and they would listen to the community’s needs.

Anyone who isn’t directly involved in the mobile industry is unlikely to realise that the site they’re browsing looks crap on their phone, not by the website owner’s fault or because their phone isn’t up to par, but squarely because of the operator’s complete disregard for its customers. A little bit of me dies every time I see a friend criticize the mobile web’s shortcomings when it’s really due to bastardised transcoding.

Operators claim to be offering a proverbial olive branch by telling mobile website owners to request to be added to a whitelist. Dennis at Wapreview sounded the alarm on the latest whitelist to join but this is a neverending game of whack-a-mole! As far as I know, between Spain and the UK, Vodafone doesn’t even share its whitelist! (If anyone can tell me I’m wrong on this one, I’ll regain a bit of faith in the Big Red.)

As Dennis explains, unless you have a handset on the local network, it’s difficult to find out what’s happening to your site once it goes through the shredder:

Unless you have a Sprint handset there’s really no way to tell if your site’s being transcoded. If you do have a Sprint phone you can generally tell just by looking at the screen but if in doubt use the device’s Show URL browser menu command. If it starts with http://sprint.aopwv.com/ you are being transcoded.

Mobhappy, Mike Rowehl, Techype, RCR Wireless News and Semapedia, amongst others, have picked up on the issue, and they’re all as unimpressed as I am with the situation.

How could anyone, in their infinite wisdom, think this was a scaleable and manageable way to decide what sites to leave as-is? Seriously, I’m willing to give anyone from an operator a fair hearing, I’ll even buy ‘em a beer, if they can explain to me how they’re going to improve on the current situation from here.

If you’re a developer and your mobile site is affected by the latest Sprint issue, register on the Sprint forums and leave a comment in this thread to get whitelisted.

[Update: Russ at Mowser posted, following my angry post, to shed light on how what Mowser does is different to the operator’s transcoders, so if you’re still fuzzy on what is proper and improper behaviour for adapting content, check out his post. At the core of it all though, Mowser listen to their users and are part of the community rather than living up in that cozy ivory tower. That makes all the difference.]