Worst of the Week: Simplicity's sequel equals complexity

Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
Earlier this year the movie “Back to the Future” apparently celebrated its 25th anniversary of being released in theaters and for some reason this has generated enough of a nostalgic feeling that the movie, which seems to be on television every other day, was recently re-released into theaters. Not to tell the movie industry how to do their job or anything, but this sort of action needs to be reserved for true classics like “Star Wars,” and “The Empire Strikes Back,” or for that matter any movie that is part of the holy “Double Trilogy.”
This flashback got me thinking about the good ole days when wireless prepaid services were thought of as the bastion of simplicity in the mobile space? No contracts, not credit checks, no hassle. Just walk into a retail store, pick up a phone, turn it on and activate. You paid a fixed price for each minute you talked or for each text message you sent and your life could not have been easier.
Sure, you might have been stuck with a low-end device that you probably had to pay full-price for and your “contract” friends might have looked down on you or asked if everything was “all right,” but those seemed reasonable trade offs for living the simple life in a complicated mobile space.
Well, fast-forward in a Delorean to today and it seems that while wireless carriers have tried to simplify the mine field that is contract-based rate plans, the prepaid space has sunk into a complexity morass rivaling the convoluted premise for “Back to the Future Part II.”
What was once simplicity has turned into the Wild West as there no longer seems to be just a simple prepaid offering. This week alone has seen a trio of new additions to the prepaid space from new options from Virgin Mobile USA, a new prepaid data plan from Verizon Wireless and a pay-as-you-go offering from MetroPCS.
All of these would be great in a bubble (as would just about anything), but in the overall context of the prepaid space, they are just adding to the confusion. It now seems that just about every operator offers a variety of prepaid options ranging from strict pay-as-you-go, prepaid unlimited, packages that include buckets of calling or messaging options and some with either unlimited or buckets of data services. Heck, MetroPCS offers unlimited services using its LTE network! Prepaid is no longer the Biff to postpaid’s Marty McFly. It now requires some sort of degree beyond one from a journalism school to master.
I know everyone is very excited about all of this prepaid stuff because supposedly everyone that can sign up for a contract wireless service has done so leaving only those that for some reason can’t pass the financial requirements of a contract or choose not to are left to grow the wireless pie. And this has led to carriers throwing just about every trick in their marketing arsenal against the wall in an attempt to placate every consumer subset.
But people, please. Let’s take a step back and realize that the real value of prepaid services is in its simplicity. Have we not realized that most consumers have way too much going on in their lives to really want to spend their weekend attempting to decipher the thousands of prepaid options now available at their local Wal-Mart? (I bring up the W-M because a number of these new prepaid services are being targeted for retail at the all-encompassing retailer.)
What’s wrong with just offering people some simple, and easy to understand rate plans and pricing models that take us back to the time when a young man could cruise around town in his vest while riding a skateboard and not have to worry about whether his existence will cease if his parents don’t kiss before he was even born or about trying to align alternate realities due to discrepancies due in divergent time lines.
Let’s leave the quantum psychics for postpaid data service pricing and keep prepaid simple. It will make for a much better reality.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
–One of my biggest pet peeves appeared to be un-peeved this week as the International Telecommunications Union, the end-all, be-all authority on all numbers associated with the letter “G,” came out with its requirements for those technologies looking to harness the power of “4.”
According to the ITU, those technologies that are officially to be called “4G” have to include a number of fancy-pants innovations that will allow networks to support download speeds of around 100 megabits per second in a mobile environment, 1 gigabit per second in “low-mobility scenarios” (which I typically assume to be when sitting on a couch watching television after eating a large pizza), latency of less than 10 milliseconds, support for “very” wide spectrum channels up to 100 megahertz and I believe the ability to support teleportation.
(The best part of this announcement was that it was made during this week’s 4G World show in Chicago that if all rules were being observed would have immediately changed its name to the “Not-Quite 4G World Show,” though that might have caused just more confusion.)
Now having those specifications nearly set in stone I can only assume that any current technology that does not meet all of those specifications will selflessly cease to promote itself as a “4G” technology or as having “4G-like” anything. This will all be done in the name of making sure consumers are not confused as to what they are buying and will lead to world harmony, including cats and dogs living together peacefully.
Yes, I am sure that is what will happen.
–Speaking of the 4G World event, while at the show I managed to find a quiet spot in the gigantic McCormick Place convention center to write. This place included a nicely padded seat and an electrical outlet. Basically all the requirements I need to be able to write. Not five minutes after finding this Shangri-La did an attendee from the show come walking into my sanctuary talking on his cell phone. For the next five minutes I watched as this person animatedly talked on his phone will walking around in some sort of circuitous chaos-theory pattern alternatively sitting on nearby seats, kicking random pillars, leaning against walls and never once standing or sitting still for more than a second. It was sort of like a more intimate version of the movie “Speed” in which the bus could not go below 50 miles per hour or it would blow up. I tell you, watching that guy for those five minutes was nerve-racking.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@ardenmedia.com.