Sunday, September 23, 2012

LTE Price plans - SingTel, SH, M1

I saw the recent update from Yahoo on iPhone price plans and I believe this is bundled with LTE data. If I see standalone BBOM plans from SingTel, the prices are 59.90 per 10GB. Which means the LTE data is valued at ~ SGD 6 / GB and the typical speeds are ~ 3.4 - 12.0 Mbps

Looking at 3G plans, for speeds of 1.4-3.7 Mbps, and the cost per GB is ~ SGD 3.

Now the question is that the industry boasted a lot that with LTE prices set to drop as the cost to TELCO's will be much cheaper in comparison with legacy 2G/3G network. LTE is an all-ip flat network and supposed to deliver 1GB of data for > USD 1. Back in 2009, Ericsson came with the business case/whitepaper to deliver 1GB for 1EUR. I saw similar paper from them and Huawei recently in some of the user forums.

So now the question is is it our TELCO's are running such a non-optimized network so their costs are substantially higher?
Or is it their profit margins are higher compared to other world telco's?

If LTE data could be delivered for $1 that means the operating margins are close to 70% for our TELCO's. That' assuming people use the bundled data completely. So in any case I see some good margins for the telcos on LTE but bad deal to the customers. So iPhone5 users, beware and if you can, hold back to your 3G plans. Let the heavy users go to LTE and bundled with the lower plan levels the network should have some free space in the near future and addresses the current congestion. (I am not hoping SingTel,SH,M1) to take any action to resolve by putting more capacity.

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