Opinion: The rise of data-heavy apps vs. low data caps

[Anonymous]

A couple of days ago Google launched its Music service in the UK, and it's absolutely fantastic. The service acts as a cloud for your music collection, allowing you to access your music from any web browser as well as giving you access directly from Android's built-in music player. Having tried this service for the past few days, I'm completely in love with it. What I'm not in love with is the amount of data it uses. Over the past 2 days of commuting 45 minutes each away, I've burnt through nearly 350MB. While music is cached after the first time of playing, rediscovering my music collection has come at the cost of using nearly all my data allowance in just 2 days.

Having looked at the O2 website, the largest bolt-on I can find for data is just 1GB, or about a week and a half of commuting. While I can appreciate that many users loading such a large amount of data can cause strain on the network, such caps will become increasingly restrictive on phone usage as more and more data-intensive apps become availabe - a criticism also levied against EE for their low data caps. This is seriously making me consider carefully whether it's worth abandoning O2 in favour of Three's all-you-can-eat data tarriff when my contract comes up for renewal next year, especially if 1GB is the upper limit on O2.

Which raises the question - would people be willing to put up with slower data speeds and more congestion if it meant that data limits were higher, possibly leaning towards an all-you-can-eat package? And would the rise of more data-intensive apps like Google Music cause more people to lean towards the higher data caps over higher speed?

[Liquid]

I'd happily have slower speeds for larger data. As long as its fast enough to play a song. I'm not fussed if it buffers as I listen, why download the entire thing in an instant if it still sounds the same?:)

When I was in Munich last year I stayed at the kempinski wifi was £40 for 24 hours. Now that's a joke.

[sheepdog]

Maybe we need a hotel wifi prices & location app!

[MI5]

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@sheepdog wrote:

Maybe we need a hotel wifi prices & location app!

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All Marriott's are free for 24 hours then £5 per day....

[Liquid]

If I could see money being made I'd make it. Seems a rather niche app unfortunately:(

[sheepdog]

Easy. Just flog ads into the app itself! Might be a fun project for myself when I get time to think about it properly just to try out mobile app building. 

[Liquid]

Hey if you get into app building I've got a concept for you:) 70/30 split;)

[sheepdog]

Now you've got me searching for databases on Android....

[Liquid]

I think this could be profitable O2 app team;) show them how it's done haha

[Anonymous]

it can be youtube or facebook Apps i would ask alway login out of facebook so it can save your data or use wi-fi