Bigger yet cheaper 4G LTE plans will become commonplace in months to come. In US alone, top three operators - AT&T, Verizon and Sprint have recently doubled the amount of data on their higher tier 4G LTE plans while keeping their prices at the same level in their bid to increase their market share . At the same time, other major operators in regions where 4G LTE services have been offered for over a year are coming out with newer and more innovative ways to entice their subscribers to move on to the 4G LTE service.
Based on a recent report by a leading telecoms tariff consultancy and research organization, Tariff Consultancy Limited (TCL), mobile network operators(MNOs) are debuting newer and more attractive 4G LTE plans to capitalize on the demand for high-speed data necessitated by the ever growing demand for rich applications such as video streaming and mobile gaming.
TCL's report is available under the TCL Global LTE Pricing Tariff Tracker subscription service. The current edition covered the pricing trends on 4G LTE plans for the 3rd quarter of this year. This latest edition found a few key trends in the way MNOs price their relatively new 4G LTE services. One of the major highlights is that pre-paid 4G LTE plans are on the rise. TCL cited operators such as Everything Everywhere (EE) in UK whose Pre Pay EE 4G plan of GBP £1 per week provides either 25 minutes voice and 50 SMS OR 10 minutes voice, 10 SMS and 100MB of data and Vodafone, also in UK, which bundled 2GB, 4GB or 6GB of data with varying voice minutes, SMS and reward points, starting from GBP £20 on its Pre Pay 4G Freedom Freebie Packs.
TCL said that the spread of 4G LTE plan quotas has grown with entry level plans starting from 300GB and top-level quotas increased to 60GB. The former was observed in Denmark where 3, an MNO offered 300MB of data for Euro 10.61 permonth while an example of the latter includes Touch in Lebanon which introducted a 4G LTE plan that offers 60GB of data for USD149 per month. In addition, TCL also noted that in the last quarter, MNOs are introducing new 'add on' 4G LTE services, where 4G LTE speeds can be purchased on demand for a small fee. Examples of this include TIM in Italy with its 4G Internet Plus that provides 4G LTE speeds for smartphones, PC and tablet users at just Euro 5 per month including 200GB space on TIM Cloud. In addition, TCL noted that MNOs are allowing 4G LTE access across all plans as a standard feature on data plans, citing Belgacom(now Proximus) which is offering 4G LTE services across all of its mobile data plans, with speeds varying according to price point.
