I’m obviously unawares how all my readers feel on the following subject but having recently been (I still am) wading through the mire that is mobile offerings in this backward and incomprehensible market – I am utterly annoyed and flabbergasted by the myriad of offerings, counter-offerings, cold-calls, jargon, and plain and simple greed.

Here’s my idea of how it should work as simply as I can put it:

Everything we do via our mobile phones is data.

There I said it. That’s the point, if you disagree you can skip to the bottom and write something nasty for me to enjoy at a later time. However if you are as I was, at 2am the other day when I sat bolt upright in my bed with the eerie silence that so often follows a world-changing paradigm-shifting revolutionary idea (you can add in the cold sweats and lightning if you want), intrigued by this idea then I will continue and elaborate for your benefit.

Instead of per-minute, per second, peak, off-peak, , free minutes, weekend minutes, anytime minutes, inter-connect fees, call more, call less, MyMeg, YourMeg, and all the thousand other differing utterly mind-boggling permutations lets have something simple.  Why do we need all that?. Keep it easy. Keep it standardised. Keep it simple, stupid.

1 gig of data could be:

1. 100 songs (4 megs per song – they could even add a % of each sale here to make more money, no harm no foul. Which at max speed of 14.4 Mbps you should download a song in 2-3 seconds.)
2. 1 movie (compressed for your small screen – approx 200 megs for feature film)
3. 400 minutes (6 hours and 40mins) of talk time at CD quality, you could get far more if you dropped it to say Skype quality. At the quality of some audio books you could double it to 800 min of talk time per month.
4. Talk only at 1/2 CD quality – which is perfectly fine – would mean 2000+ minutes of talk time or just over an hour a day
5. All this for R100 per month

Now isn’t that much simpler.

What about the actual phone I hear you ask?

Well that’s easy. Either buy the phone outright at cost + 25% mark-up (that’s all providers, no 200% mark-up for nothing thank you very much) or have the phone financed at cost + mark-up over the contract period with interest as per usual with any easy payment terms offer out there. Of course providers, please display the final cost of the phone with total interest included.

What about mobile Internet?

Connect your phone to your laptop (via cable or Bluetooth) and you no longer need an extra 3G dongle, no mess, no fuss, mobile internet. Done.

Consider for a moment how much more freeing this would be?

How much simpler is this? How much less distracting ‘noise’ there is in the product offering to confuse and distance the consumer from the true cost of the offering. It is no accident that the offerings, when all compared are so confusing.

However the above option, to me, just makes sense.

What does not make sense is why it is any other way?

Note to the reader: I am directing the sarcasm, patronising tone, and utter disbelief at our mobile phone operators. Please don’t take it personally it is for their benefit.