The Price of Mobility Revisited

Dean Bubley has an interesting idea whereby the cost of your mobility depends on the extent of your mobility.

He distinguishes nomadicity from mobility and comes up with what he calls "velocity-specific pricing":-

Quote:

I wonder, though, if the push for geo-specific pricing is actually a special case of what should really be in place: velocity-specific pricing. Maybe we should be pricing mobile communications based on how mobile you are. A call when you're stationary is cheaper than a call when you're walking, which is cheaper than one made on the bus/in a car, and so on to trains & planes. If you're on a femtocell in your bedroom, or connected via WiFi/FON in your neighbours house, you shouldn't be subsidising the calls of the salesman in his Mercedes driving 80mph down the M4.

http://disruptivewireless.blogspot.com/ ... emium.html

It's an interesting concept. In terms of my personal experience with my mobile device, commuting on the train is the only time when I really value the ability to be moving (and I'm more interested in email, not voice, on the train). Other than that if I'm on the phone I'm probably stationary. I would imagine that a WiFi access point, if available whenver I'm stationary, could cater to 90% of my mobile needs. I'm mostly nomadic.

Hi

Originaly the likes of vodofone did price GSM on these lines, where by the tarrif altered depending on your "home" cell and distance from it. One2One also had similar, as do Orange business for large campus sites even today. And with the advent of femtocells The handover problem will be a thin of the past.

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I would imagine that a WiFi access point, if available whenver I'm stationary, could cater to 90% of my mobile needs.

The problem here is that in my case over 90% of my nomaic time there is no Wifi coverage. this is the big difference between rural and urban. Here we have little or no wifi and no 3g. Even if the BT/Fon sharing took off, It wouldnt help as all the house walls are so thick that signal quality would be so poor to make it unworkable.


Ian