The long-term impact of mobile unlimited data plans in the U.S. market is not yet clear, despite the obvious implication that, under such a regime, it is hard for service providers to produce incremental revenue based on incremental increases in usage.
In the near term, unlimited usage plans might even be revenue positive. In the early going, a shift to unlimited plans might have lead to lower average revenue per account, as heavy users were able to shift to unlimited usage plans that cost less.
For most other users, a shift to unlimited plans will generally lead to higher average revenue per account.
Also, as usage generally increases, service providers are adding huge amounts of new capacity. So the immediate impact of the shift to unlimited plans might be higher usage, leading to more potential for congestion.
But even there, the pattern of usage matters. If users actually consume more data off-peak, the congestion impact is minimized. If users consume more data at peak, congestion issues are magnified. It is not yet clear how unlimited plans might add new load (at peak or off peak).
But consumers generally are rational. They are able to weigh value against price. “The people who are going to step up to unlimited, they may not want to pay $20 a month more for an extra 4 gigs, but they'll pay $20 a month more to move from whatever bucket they're on to unlimited,” said Matthew Ellis, Verizon CFO. “If you give somebody the chance to save money and get something more a lot of them are pretty quick to do that.”
So the long-term ARPU impact of unlimited might not be negative, if it results in significant numbers of customers buying higher-priced plans, and if the pattern of higher usage is off peak, or at peak.
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