HELSINKI, Finland—Sonera, the Helsinki-based telecom company, has abandoned its fixed monthly connection charge for its consumer General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) offering in a move designed to increase use of the service.
Under Sonera’s new policy, all subscribers to Sonera’s GSM service in Finland can log onto the GPRS network if they own a compatible handset. “We hope that this greater and cheaper ease of access will boost overall usage,” said Heikki Marttimo, Sonera’s product manager.
Additionally, Sonera has decided to waive connection charges for Sonera Group’s Open and Pro Data services for active users and its Company Data service for corporate customers until 28 February. However, the per-kilobyte charge will also apply to these services in the future. As a further inducement, users of the Open Data service will not be charged for using Sonera’s Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) services throughout 2002.
Sonera launched its GPRS service in November 2000. At that time, users were levied a fixed charge of US$14.34. Under the new regime, users are charged for use only, with each kilobyte of data costing US$0.01.
“Sonera has several thousand GPRS users, both private and corporate, and we are more or less at the level we anticipated. Quite obviously, we want to go much higher,” said Marttimo.
The Finnish telecom is banking on users reacting positively to the new introduction of a low-entry product. “What we have done is positive for users, and critical for WAP services,” said Marttimo.
The Sonera service also enables the receiving of telephone calls during a GPRS connection. Users can also check data transmission costs by sending text messages.
