Mobile data paradox

My chum Tony Poulos interviewed an analyst from Ovum about mobile data pricing recently. I was listening to this, and it reminded me about a huge telecommunications conference that I attended a couple of months ago. There were hundreds of people and operators from all around the world. At one point during the event, the wifi went down. At this point, not only did people stop blogging, twittering and otherwise recording what was going on but actually stopped looking at and listening to the speaker. Basically, at an event full of people from telcos, no-one had data roaming turned on.

The mobile operators have priced mobile data roaming so insanely that they are encouraging their customers and their own employees to seek alternatives. Instead of making a reasonable amount of money from them, they make none, and are actively training the customers to reduce future revenues. I don't need my e-mail every second - it's not like I'm a heart surgeon waiting to hear about a transplant - and people can text me if there's anything urgent. So I leave roaming turned off and wait until I walk part Starbucks or wherever.

If they keep this up, they may be able to persuade to turn off mobile data completely.

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen megabytes