Taxes, Fees, and Surcharges Cramp 3G’s Style

You see them everywhere these days. Mobile video messages. Mobile web. Mobile MySpace. It’s hard to ignore it all, especially with the advent of 3G and beyond. They’re said to be the next frontier in Web 2.0. Only, there’s a problem, and a big one at that: the fee.

We’re not charged only for voice. We pay as well for email on the go, those text messages from our phones to our buds’ – even videos can’t be uploaded to YouTube without a data charge or a pre-paid plan. It’s understandable for cellular carriers to require payment for bandwidth usage, but simplifying that segment of the market would help to increase adoption of carrier-based and third-party services and software greatly. More users means more publicity, more publicity gets the Vodafones, Cingulars, T-Mobiles to adopt more subscribers, and more subscribers means more money.

Just recently, news came about that T-Mobile recruited the engineers at Nokia and Ericsson to construct a 3G network in the US to get competitive with the “big three.” It’ll cost the company over $2 billion to implement. The easiest way for them to refill on cash would be to drop the excessive extras everyone will need to fully utilize the new technology and make it easier with universal or 2- or 3-tiered options, enabling consumers to decide where best to spend their money without bogging them down with fine print or lengthy complain calls to Customer Service.

For example, T-Mobile has T-Zones, a service already several years in place that allows users to check the weather, movie times, and other such information. But users of the add-on are unable to browse the web. I know this from first-hand experience.

T-Mobile Web, however, is a more recent product offered by the carrier. It also allows subscribers to check up on news and events, but does include the ability for one to check webmail accounts (tailored to mobile devices) while away from a PC. When both items are marketed, it wouldn’t surprise many to find current subscribers tacking both onto their monthly bill, regardless of the redundancy.

Premium content will always come with a charge, but a bandwidth charge should be part-and-parcel with the content purchased. Otherwise, reactions to the “data tax” will continue to be unpleasant, and carriers will not be selling those extras at the rates they’ve predicted. They’ve succeeded so far in distancing millions from tunes and videos, and will continue to do so unless they turn off the greed and allow some practical and non-limiting benefits to those jumping aboard their new, speedier networks.