T-Mobile has launched a big advertising campaign to promote its data service 't-zones' across four of its European markets. The campaign, which according to a report on cellular news.com was created by Saatchi and Saatchi, was first announced during CeBIT in March 2003 and will run in the UK, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.
The campaign coincides with the introduction of 't-zones easy access' across three handsets, the Nokia 3650, the Samsung SGH-V200 and the Panasonic GD87 These handsets now include specially branded keys, offering instant access to t-zones. More such handsets will be introduced later in the year.
T-zones is a mobile data portal for T-Mobile International, not unlike Vodafone Live!. It is presently active in six countries – Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, the UK and the USA. The service is organised into dedicated content channels with supplementary areas of interest such as email, downloads and highlights. As of March 2003, T-Mobile says that t-zones has over 10 million users in its European markets with content coming from Deutsche Telekom group partners T-Online and t-info as well as a variety of other brands such as Walt Disney Internet Group, Sony Pictures Digital, Financial Times, Dow Jones, Wall Street Journal and Sky Sports.
GPRS tariffs
The t-zones advertising campaign coincides with the launch of new data tariffs in Germany. On 12 March 2003 T-Mobile Germany announced it was cutting its prices for GPRS data transmission and also presented its UMTS tariffs for the first time. As from 15 April 2003, the transmission of a data block will cost EUR 0.09 on all GPRS tariffs, corresponding to a price cut of almost 70% compared with existing tariffs. With this price offensive T-Mobile says it is targeting the mass market and the operator hopes that this will serve to boost the take-up of mobile data services ahead of T-Mobile's launch of UMTS.
With the new default GPRS connection price for post-paid customers, the charge for accessing t-zones falls from EUR 0.29 to EUR 0.09 per ten kilobytes (10 KB). The price for other usage also drops from EUR 0.29 per 10 KB transmitted to EUR 0.19 cents per 20 KB transmitted. The daytime usage price of EUR 0.09 remains unchanged.
The T-Mobile GPRS portfolio for private customers will have three GPRS tariff options with inclusive volumes, instead of two, as was the case previously. These are T-Mobile Data 1, T-Mobile Data 5 and T-Mobile Data 20.
With T-Mobile Data 1, the monthly basic price of EUR 4.95 includes the transmission of 1 MB of data, sufficient for 1,000 t-zones pages or enough to send around 333 short e-mails via t-zones. In the previous GPRS Profi option, the monthly basic price with an inclusive volume of 1 MB was EUR 9.95.
The new T-Mobile Data 5 GPRS option is recommended for customers who frequently send longer emails or who often surf the t-zones using PC phones such as the T-Mobile MDA. With this option the monthly basic price of EUR 9.95 includes a transmission volume of 5 MB.
So-called heavy users who regularly surf the Internet via GPRS will save EUR 10 per month using the T-Mobile Data 20 option instead of the current GPRS Office option. With an unchanged inclusive volume of 20 MB, the monthly premium falls from EUR 39.95 to EUR 29.95.
For prepaid customers the price for the transmission of 10 KB via GPRS has fallen from EUR 0.29 to EUR 0.19. The daytime usage price of EUR 0.09 remains unchanged.
UMTS and WLAN
The prices above will, at least initially, also apply to T-Mobile's UMTS services when they are launched in Q3 2003 and T-Mobile says it believes that the simplicity and competitiveness of its new price plan will help to make the launch a success. What is notable is that T-Mobile still maintains a tariff model based on data usage contrary to 3's event based tariffs in the UK. Operator experience with extensive data usage is still relatively limited, so it is likely that tariff models will change once operators have had time to assess usage patterns.
T-Mobile's integration of WLAN into its data offerings may also prompt the operator to change its billing strategy. WLAN will be billed per minute of airtime rather than per volume of usage and the difference in billing method may make the GPRS/UMTS/WLAN offering appear less than seamless to the customer. T-Mobile Germany says it intends to supply around 250 hotspots with WLAN by the end of 2003. Across the group in Europe and the USA, T-Mobile says it intends to install 3,000 new hotspots during 2003 making the total number of hotspots in operation around 5,600 by end 2003.
Handset sales
T-Mobile believes that it has, 'achieved the critical mass required to help data services take off'. Of the 12 million mobile devices it sold in Europe during 2002, 94% were WAP-capable, 54% were GPRS-enabled and 25% were equipped with a Java client. During 2003 T-Mobile says it wants to raise the figure for GPRS to 70%, and for Java to 50%, while 50% should also have a colour display and at least 30% should be MMS-enabled.
In Europe T-Mobile says it already has 2.2 million people actively using the t-zones portal each month and has reported that the number of visits to the portal increased by 50% in the six months up to March 2003, with GPRS data traffic growing by 20% each month. In the year up to CeBIT (March 2003), the volume of GPRS data traffic on T-Mobile's networks in Europe has 'more than tripled'. Since the introduction of T-Mobile's international download centre there have been 1.3 million downloads of products such as ring tones and operator logos.
T-Mobile finally says the up-take of MMS has been positive. By mid March 2003 the operator claimed it had sold over one million MMS-enabled devices in Europe and the U.S. In Germany alone T-Mobile reported, 'well over 300,000' MMS-enabled handsets sold.
EMC World Cellular Data Metrics tracks SMS traffic data, MMSC contract awards, launch status and tariffs among other mobile data indicators including MMS traffic for key operators worldwide.
For more information on EMC World Cellular Data Metrics seehttp://www.emc-database.com/redir.nsf/index/WCDM?OpenDocument&source=dz113a
