Shared Data Plans – Are We Getting Them?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could share your prepaid or contract data allowance with others in your family or with other devices that you currently own. Many of us including me don’t use anywhere near the data allowance we are given access to.

This is apparently becoming more popular amongst mobile phone providers around the world but is still relatively new or novel in Australia. I understand that both KISS Mobile and gotalk offer such a feature at the moment. Gotalk call it Shared Balance and it allows you to share your allowance across certain plans with other family members. It also allows you to add credit to one balance which covers multiple devices.

Will it become the norm and when? Given the lack of offers available in the Australian market at the moment, it seems that many providers simply aren’t rushing to offer this to their customers. You have to ask yourself why would they when they can charge you twice for the data. Apparently there are other explanations however.

Some carriers may be slow to enter this new arena because implementing a shared data plan is more challenging than it sounds. Such plans demand a more “customer-centric approach,” according to Infonetics, requiring a “radical change from the way in which customers have been managed to this point.” Carriers need to set up new types of policy administration and new ways to manage subscriber data.

But by 2015, it is expected that some 15% of devices sold will be under some form of shared data plan. The growth and demand for these plans is expected from heavy competition 3G regions such as North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

Shared data plans let you use a single plan for multiple devices or multiple family members. So instead of subscribing to separate data plans for a smartphone, a tablet, and a modem from the same carrier, you could opt for a single data plan pooled among all three devices, thereby paying one overall lower fee for the entire package. Family members could also share a single data plan amongst themselves just as they now share a pool of their voice minutes.

Beyond benefiting customers, shared data plans could also benefit the carriers. People who already pay for a data plan for their cell phones can be reluctant to buy another one for their tablets or 3G-enabled notebooks. A single cost-effective plan shared among all devices could ring up higher overall sales for the carriers.