Germans join Japanese in WAP charging

 

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Posted on 2 Aug 2001 at 15:09

German telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom, following the lead given by Japan's NTT DoCoMo, has announced that it will be charging users to access certain Web sites on mobile phones from November, with plans to do the same in the UK in conjunction with One 2 One.

The company's mobile Internet portal is set to charge the equivalent of about £6 for a package of services including sports, financial and music news and a food guide. A similar service is then planned for the UK and Austria.

Half the revenues from the service will be shared with the content providers, a move which Deutsche Telekom hopes will drive standards up, as it has in Japan. Until now European WAP content has been criticised, but it is argued that in Japan DoCoMo's I-mode service has forced content providers to increase the quality of output in order to persuade potential customers to pay.

However, it might not be quite so easy to replicate DoCoMo's success in the rest of the world. Only about 20 per cent of the Japanese have Web access from the desktop and so have to rely on mobile content. Consequently, there is less of a "free-Internet" culture.

Lesser factors might also come in to play. Much of I-mode's usage occurs on public transport, upon which Japanese commuters are heavily reliant. This is a variable factor in other countries and in the US, for instance, public transport is very much subservient to the private car.

DoCoMo has also been successful in differentiating what they provide from what is widely available on the Internet. I-mode is sold as a service - do you want to buy stock quotes, sports results, the weather, etc? - not as an alternative way to surf the Web. But it is unclear whether the same distinction can be made elsewhere, where nobody expects to pay for electronic information, even if they will quite happily pay for it on other media.

Nonetheless, Deutsche Telekom's plans may help to make it easier for companies to sell over the Internet. M-commerce (e-commerce on mobile devices) transactions could be charged to customers' phone bills rather than credit card accounts, turning the phone into an "electronic wallet".

Author: Simon Aughton