That day is further off, now that AT&T has ceased selling unlimited data plans for smartphones and Apple iPads and implemented monthly data limits: 200 MB for $15 or 2 GB for $25, expandable for $10 per gigabyte.
As apps conceived with the iPhone in mind especially data-hungry music, video and magazine services migrate to other platforms, unlimited wireless data plans could become a thing of the past for all but enterprise users whose plans are covered by (and subject to) corporate policy. Sure, there are hot spots all over the place, but being mobile isnt just not being home, its actually being in motion and unless your plane, train or automobile has Wi-Fi, you'll be relying on 3G.
Paying $15 per month for wireless data provides just over seven hours of cloud-based music, even considering the highly compressed audio codecs used by mobile streaming services. Its probably not enough for a single week of commuting and that's assuming that you do nothing else with your wireless data plan. Add video, magazines, web surfing, apps and e-mail to the mix, and the dream of accessing any song from anywhere remains exactly that, even with the more generous $30 per month plan.
Music services typically charge $10 per month so that they can cover licensing fees, and $40 per month is too much to pay for music in the cloud. The vast majority of us already refuse to pony up $5 per month for web-only unlimited music or $10 for unlimited mobile music services (Rhapsody, Napster, MOG, mSpot, etc.).
Smartphones and tablets don't need digital rights management they are DRM.Many of us have no need to exceed AT&Ts data limits today but that's because most of us don't use cloud-based music or media services. In addition, data-intensive digital magazines such as Wired magazines first edition, which would consume about a quarter of a $15/month users monthly allotment as Twitter user etchalon tweeted via his iPhone on Wednesday, are a recent phenomenon.
These data limits will have real effects on how we access music, video and other large data files from mobile devices, but they're also about perception. It would feel irresponsible to fritter away one-seventh of your monthly data plan on a single hour of music, when it means you might not be able to check your e-mail in a couple of weeks. Even if you never actually run up against that limit, the very idea that it exists will prevent people from engaging in data-intensive, entertainment-oriented activities in the cloud.
Ultimately, limiting mobile data wont kill cloud-based music and video services. It will change the way we use them. Wi-Fi connections and mobile data caches rather than mobile data connections will be our main links to media in the cloud for the foreseeable future.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
