AT&T asks the wrong questions

AT&T has been an unpopular mobile carrier for a while now. And their decision to implement a tiered pricing model for their data plans with a 2GB cap has made them even less popular (I didn’t think it was possible either). But as Christopher Schanck points out, instead of asking how best to gouge their current high-use customers, they should be asking why aren’t their low-use customers using more?

Rather than ask what is the lowest point they could cheaply cap data and still make money, they should have asked: Why are so many people using so little bandwidth? Or, put another way, you should be ashamed of yourself if you sell a device like the iPhone and then encourage people use it so lightly that they only consume a couple hundred megs of data a month.

Really, AT&T (and Apple, hello!) should be dying to get people to use 1-2 gigabytes of data a month at least. The more data people use the more entrenched the phone becomes in their lives.

AT&T’s new pricing model is surely a blow to the future of mobile video and TV, how big of a blow it will be to their customer base remains to be seen.

[via Hacker News]