Hooray! We can afford 4G after all!

A few months ago I wrote a piece asking: 'Can EE make 4G a success in Britain?' – the idea being that by being first to market, the brand created by fusing Orange and T-Mobile would gain the key association with next-generation speeds.

It's certainly made a strong fist of that through a huge marketing campaign; from lighting up Battersea Power Station to myriad adverts throughout Britain's cities the message was certainly prevalent, although some consumers still are only vaguely aware of new thing that offers faster mobile speeds, then baulk when they hear how much it will cost.

When EE announced its 4G prices, hearts collectively sank. Paying £56 a month for 8GB of data? Sure, you can pay the carrier less and have fewer bytes to play with, but if you're not going to do data-sapping activities like streaming movies and playing games on the go, what's the point in having 4G at all?

Consumers still aren't bothered about waiting 4 seconds rather than 2 to load a webpage. They're not going around playing online games yet, and the likes of NetFlix are still services mostly viewed in the home - so paying a huge amount extra at this early stage can be a hard sell. Make it cheap enough to use and people will find use cases.

Cheap at half the price

In the same piece, I also noted that "While we can't expect to pay rock-bottom rates for the faster speeds (it's not free to deploy 4G, obviously);" thankfully, that appears to have been incorrect according to the announcement from Three today.

While it hasn't elaborated on its plans exactly, the news that it won't be charging a premium to use 4G is a massive boost to consumers that wanted to be on next-generation speeds but had that pesky issue of wanting to eat each month as well.

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