Global Nerdy

US mobile rates vs UK mobile rates

The New York Times has a comparison of the prices for similar mobile plans in the US and the UK. Here’s how they compare:

Data from the New York Times.

Not only is the UK plan cheaper by $41.50 per month (or just shy of $1000 cheaper over the two-year commitment), but it provides unlimited data. The 2GB limit has been described as being enough to stream 15 minutes of music and 10 minutes of video daily (although at least one carrier doesn’t count data from a number of music services).

Many plans feature unlimited voice and text, because that’s not where the money is these days. Regular readers of this blog already know that:

We posted this graph in an earlier article, as well as in this video.
Click the graph to see it at full size.

One of the factors cited in explaining the difference is regulatory policy. In the UK, companies are legally required to lease their networks to the competition at cost; this is not the case here in the US. Without this requirement, US carriers are protected from competitors, but they’re also spared from having to compete on price. The result, according to the Open Technology Institute’s Sascha Meinrath, is that “U.S. consumers may overpay by over a quarter of a trillion dollars for worse levels of service than customers in other countries receive” over the next decade.

US/UK mobile rates vs. Australia, China, Germany, and Japan

A couple of weeks prior to the New York Times article, TechHive posted an article titled No, U.S. smartphone costs aren’t highest in the world.

According to the article, our costs are somewhere in the middle:

The article points out a couple of interesting things to keep in mind when comparing US rates with those in other countries:

• The quoted cost for the UK doesn’t include roaming or international calls.
• In Europe, you’re more likely to call another country, and will have to pay extra to cover those costs.
• Plans in Australia factor the cost of the device into monthly fees, so you pay nothing up front for a new phone, but your monthly bill will be higher. Over 24 months, the costs of ownership in the US and Down Under are close.
• Phones are often cheaper in the US, thanks to carrier subsidizing them.
• “Unlimited” plans like the ones from Japan’s Au Kddi are unlimited only when calling other people on the same carrier, otherwise charges apply. Many other countries’ carriers’ plans have similar hitches.

It also points to some trends which may indicate things to come:

• Expect to see “innovations” in the way mobile devices are financed: bundling into monthly costs, financing for prepaid devices, and options to lease or rent devices from carriers.
• With the rate at which people trade in old phones for new ones, carriers are setting up buyback programs, which give customers some money towards their next purchase, and carriers the chance to use the devices for parts or resale.
• Carriers have been getting creative and flexible with the plans they’ve been offering, from freeing users from contracts, to other incentives to attract new customers away from the competition.

Here in North America, a good number of people have never heard of Huawei. Many people don’t even know how to pronounce their name:

In case you were wondering, Huawei is pronounced “wah-way”.

“Huawei” is the transliteration of the Chinese name 华为, which can be interpreted as “achievement for China” or “action for China”. No matter which interpretation you prefer, both are fitting, as they’re the number three mobile phone vendor in the world in terms of market share, after Samsung and Apple:

Data from IDC’s 2Q14 Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
See this article for details.

Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Shenzhen, Huawei has grown to become the world’s largest maker of telecom equipment, surpassing the former leader Ericsson in 2012. They count most telecom carriers worldwide as their customers, and the next market they plan to conquer is mobile devices.

The plan seems to be working; Huawei nearly doubled their shipments from 2Q13 to 2Q14, and analysts says that Samsung should be eyeing their rear-view mirrors very carefully. They’re more of a threat to Samsung than Apple, as they’re in the same business: selling Android devices at various price points to a price-sensitive clientele.

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an interview with Richard Yu (Yu Chengdong), the head of Huawei’s consumer business group, in which he talked about Huawei’s foray into consumer devices, the advantages they have as a result of being a telecom equipment manufacturer, and their plans for using various operating systems in their smartphones: Android (yes), Windows Phone (on hold), and Tizen (“We feel Tizen has no chance to be successful”).

Infographic: How today’s carriers came to be (and how one didn’t)

This recent infographic created by the folks at GigaOm shows the origins of the “Big Four” carriers, the sizes of their subscriber bases, and what might have been if Sprint and T-Mobile had merged (they would’ve been second-largest in subscribers, behind AT&T, but ahead of Verizon).

Click the infographic to see it at full size.

And the competing continues…

After months of pursuing a merger with T-Mobile, saying that they needed to team up in order to compete effectively against the giants AT&T and Verizon, they merger called off, Sprint and its parent company SoftBank called it off and are going it alone. Now that the marriage is off, the smaller half of the “Big Four” carriers are back to poaching each other’s customers.

Not only did Sprint get a new CEO, they got a new, more aggressive approach to pricing. They’ve recently introduced plans that give customers more data for the same price as similarly-priced plans offered by the competition and have even borrowed a page from T-Mobile’s book of tricks: reimbursing customers who switch for their early termination fees. Sprint have also announced a new plan featuring unlimited talk, text, and data that “$20 cheaper than T-Mobile”.

In response, T-Mobile have promised more “offers and Uncarrier moves” this week, and CEO John Legere retorted with this spicy tweet:

Our plan: have Data Strong network, listen to customers. @Sprint plan: trick customers w/ confusing offer, keep crap network, watch ’em run.

— John Legere (@JohnLegere) August 24, 2014

Here’s Bloomberg Newsweek’s take on the Sprint/T-Mobile fight:

While AT&T and Verizon may be in the more comfortable position of being content to let Sprint and T-Mobile battle it out with price cutting, they’re not completely insulated from the battle. AT&T, through their subsidiary Cricket Wireless, are taking the fight to the pre-paid market by offering a $100 credit to users who switch from T-Mobile and its pre-paid subsidiary MetroPCS to Cricket.

It’s something that the Sugru community (apparently, there is one) has discovered:

In the case of Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service, Colin Cochran filed a class action suit against his employer, the largest direct-to-home food delivery service in the U.S., on behalf of customer service managers who weren’t being reimbursed for work-related use of personal mobile phones. Cochran won, and the ruling is expected to have a significant impact on the way companies do BYOD, and in some cases, may even “bring it down”, if the somewhat alarmist title of this CIO article covering the case’s outcome is to be believed.

The Second District Appellate Court of California.

The case was first taken to the Los Angeles Superior Court, and then the Second District Appellate Court, where the ruling was made on Tuesday, August 12th. Judge Teresa Sanchez-Gordon had said that a class action was not the best way to resolve the issue, noting that examination was required to resolve the question of whether Cochran or his live-in girlfriend paid his mobile bill. In the end, the court ruled that even if a family member or friend pays the costs of using a personal mobile device, if that device is used for work-related purposes, the employer is still required to provide reasonable reimbursement for the employee.

“If an employee is required to make work-related calls on a personal cell phone, then he or she is incurring an expense for purposes of labor law,” Judge Judith Ashmann-Gerst wrote for the court. “It does not matter whether the phone bill is paid for by a third person, or at all. In other words, it is no concern to the employer that the employee may pass on the expense to a family member or friend, or to a carrier that has to then write off a loss. It is irrelevant whether the employee changed plans to accommodate work-related cell phone usage. Also, the details of the employee’s cell phone plan do not factor into the liability analysis. Not only does our interpretation prevent employers from passing on operating expenses, it also prevents them from digging into the private lives of their employees to unearth how they handle their finances vis-a-vis family, friends and creditors. To show liability under the labor code, an employee need only show that he or she was required to use a personal cell phone to make work-related calls, and he or she was not reimbursed. Damages, of course, raise issues that are more complicated.”

It wasn’t all that long ago that there were predictions that BYOD stipends would eventually go away and that BYOD for work would be like business clothes: something for which employees would cover the costs and not expect any reimbursement. It was expected in some circles that BYOD stipends would disappear just like reimbursements for telecommuters who used at-home wifi did. The ruling will likely not only render those predictions wrong, it may even lead to the return of reimbursement for wifi for work done at home.

Hyoun Park, Principal Consultant at DataHive Consulting who’s been following the case, says that there are some technical wrinkles in the ruling that need to be worked out. “The court didn’t care about whether you bought 100 megabytes or an unlimited plan. They’re just saying that the company should pay for a portion of the bill. So there’s going to be an argument there.”

In the end, organizations in California with BYOD programs or who require their employees to use their own mobile phones for work will need to review how mobile devices are used in their day-to-day business, and if necessary, make adjustments. They’ll need to review their mobile device use policies and decide if they want to continue requiring employees to provide their own mobile devices for work use. If they decide to rely on individual-liable devices, they’ll need to make certain they know which employee-owned mobile assets are being used for work purposes, implement a stipend or reimbursement policy, and have some kind of mobile management platform to stay on top of these measures.

On the other hand, if a California business decides to simply disallow the use of personal mobile devices for work, they’ll need to come up with an alternative for employees who require mobile devices. This arrangement will also require management of all sorts, from a corporate-liable device policy to manage the inventory, and once again, some kind of mobile management platform to watch over these incredibly portable company assets.

While the ruling won’t take effect until 30 days after it was made and applies only in the state of California, there’s a good chance that it’ll soon affect personal mobiles used for business outside The Golden State. We’ll keep you up-to-date on these developments.

A record-breaking number of smartphones shipped in 2Q14

Click the graph to see it at full size.

For the first time ever, more than 300 million smartphones were shipped in a single quarter. The market research and analyst firm IDC stated in their most recent press release that according to their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker data, smartphone vendors shipped a record-breaking 301.3 million units in the second quarter of 2014. In the same quarter in 2014, smartphone vendors shipped 240.5 million, making this year’s change a 25.3% year-over-year increase.

The chart above is based on the table of 2013 and 2014 smartphone shipments included in IDC’s press release, which we’ve reproduced below:

Some of IDC’s observations on the data:

• With almost 85% of the global market share, Android have set a new market share record, doubling their share from a mere three years ago. Samsung account for just under 30% of the Android shipments, a drop from their 40% share two years ago.
• The second quarter is always the slowest for iOS, as they traditionally release a new phone around the end of the third quarter. The tradition is expected to continue this year, with a lot of expectation that Apple will unveil the next iPhone on September 9.
• Windows phone is the “clear number 3 smartphone platform,” to use IDC’s words. IDC reports that while Windows Phone’s shipments for 2014 are down from 2013, but their 2Q14 shipments are an improvement over their 1Q14 numbers.
• With less than 1% market share, it’s time for even the most resilient of BlackBerry holdouts to face the fact that theirs is no longer a viable platform.

It’s an Android/iOS world; we just live in it

Based on IDC’s numbers, the combined share of Android and iOS is 96.4% this quarter, leaving the remaining players to fight over the remaining 5.6%. Android and iOS were the only mobile operating systems to see year-over-year growth this quarter, with Android shipments up 33%, and iOS shipments up nearly 13%. Every other OS vendor lost share between this year and last.

Lenovo sells more mobile devices than PCs, becomes the world’s number 4 smartphone vendor

You’d never know it from their US site, pictured below, which appears to be solely focused on PCs and servers…

…but Lenovo now sells more mobile devices than PCs. In fact, they’re the number 4 smartphone vendor, according to IDC, who published this data in there Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report:

Most of Lenovo’s smartphone sales are in China, where they’re the number one smartphone vendor. They aim to change that with the assistance of their recent purchase of Motorola, who’ve been releasing some impressive yet inexpensive smartphones, such as the Moto G and Moto E (which we raved about back in May).

For more, here’s the Wall Street Journal’s Yun-Hee Kim talking to IDC analyst Brian Ma about Lenovo’s next big ambition: to expand their presence in North America and Europe and take on Apple and Samsung:

Thanks to Phil Caruso, GSG’s Director, Channel Programs for the heads-up!