Tuesday, October 11, 2005

EVDO's magic price

Sprint and Verizon currently sell EVDO (high speed wireless data service) for $60–$70 per month, which is a pretty high price for high speed service.  I think that the price needs to get to around $30 before there is widespread adoption.

Here’s my personal reasoning:

Blackberry service on my Nextel costs around $50 per month.  If I could save $20 per month and have full-blown high-speed data access on a smart device that was Exchange-capable in some way and had Bluetooth so that I could tether my laptop, I would be very excited.

Om Malik agrees with me and adds this in his post:

“The buzz is the same we saw in China seven or eight years ago in the early part of the market cycle, the same we saw a couple of years ago in Latin America,’ he said. Ollila’s designated successor as CEO, Chief Operating Officer Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, told the FT: “It is not a question of one iconic product; it is a question of many iconic products and that relates to the segmentation of the marketplace.”

Gabriel Brown, Chief Analyst of Unstrung Insider estimates that a “subscription price of $30 (€25) per month will be the point at which mobile broadband over cellular networks will become attractive to the mass market.”

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