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British Operator EE Offers £8 Million Petabyte 4G Data Bundle
judgecorp writes "British mobile operator EE is offering a massive 1 Petabyte data bundle to businesses spread across multiple phones,.It's more than a gimmick to promote the 4G data service — it's aimed at heavy data users such as media companies who use data networks to upload content. This deal charges £8 per gigabyte, which is less than half the cost of the satellite uplinks they currently use. So the £8 million cost of this package might even result in savings for some organizations."
It's expensive for even the most evil carrier in the world, AT&T, which only charges $10/gb. And that's without any kind of bulk data rate discount.
For a business, part of what you get for the money is service and the ability to hold the company's feet to the fire. For 10 EUR a month, you more or less have no power, for 8 Million EUR, you would have some sway.
Keep in mind that if media companies could really use those 10 EUR plans, they would, they pay for the sat uplinks for a reason.
EE and their subsidiaries are the most complained about telecommunications company in the United Kingdom, according to the regulator Ofcom. They may want to rethink their target market for this service too.
I don't think fibre would cover the situations these are being targeted for. It is more of a mobile environment where a hardline connection isn't available. Imagine a news truck editing some interview feed and shooting it back to the station to air on the news in 10 minutes or so. Imagine an engineering firm sending an inspector to a remote location to see the progress of a project or potential damage so preparation can be made for repairs earlier and he sends video feeds back in real time so the firm can assess other areas to look into.
These are functions that a satellite link has typically been used for that a wireless plan might save some cash on. These are also functions where a fiber connect may not be available or was disabled somehow (building fire, natural disaster, vandalism and many other reasons).
At $10 a gb, that would still cost $10 million for a petabyte.
I don't think people quite understand how much data a petabyte is. I see some 4TB drives on Amazon running around $300 each (consumer grade drives - go with me on this). How long does it take the average user to fill up 4TB with stuff they are pulling over the internet? Many ISPs cap you at 200 gig of data a month, some are lower, so 20 months if you were capping out your bandwidth cap every month to fill one of these drives. A Petabyte is 250 of these drives.
Even for corporations, a Petabyte is a considerable amount of data, unless you are someone like Google or Netflix or something. A non-profit I volunteer at has a considerable amount of HD video we toss around to the different campuses over a fiber network, and the video we generate from an event can easily be over a terabyte as we archive each camera. it wouldn't surprise me that between simulcasting and moving files around if we don't hit 20 terabytes of data a week - on a LANDLINE FIBER network. That would take us a year to hit a Petabyte.
This carrier is offering a Petabyte of data on a MOBILE network. That is a considerable amount of data, especially considering its 4G - I doubt a hundred users using 4G to constntly stream HD or even UHD video could even come close to, say, 50 terabytes a month. Shoot, on 4G, if a single user is constantly maxing out his bandwidth, they might hit 400-500 gig a month.
A petabyte of 4G data is a considerable amount of data, and is going to take a LONG time, even with hundreds of users, to hit this cap. I truthfully only seeing a plan like this being useful to people like BBC (since its in Britain) with field reporters piping in reports back to the home office, and this would be considerably cheaper than launching a satelite and considerably easier and cheaper to send out a reporter with a camera and 4g hotspot as opposed to a newsvan with a satelite truck or antenna truck. The cost savings would be huge.
Also if they are spreading this data across multiple 4G devices, this may be a cost savings for connecting remote users and offices in rural areas. I mean, think if you had a company with 1000 offices in rural areas (sounds a bit much for a country the size of Britain, but its an arbitrary number) that needed constant access to data and apps at corporate's data center - then think about the cost of running fiber, T1s or whatever out to them - as they are rural it is going to be incredibly expensive for each branch.
8 Million GBP may sound like a ton of money, but they are offering a ton of data in exchange. This may be very attractive to a few large corporations with tons of users using mobile data, corporations with tons of field users or rural offices, and news agencies.
My big question is if EE is going to use these fees to help them build up their network. I am not sure how efficient EE is, but if they sale a few of these packages, I am sure that those users will be expecting exceptional service, and if you get a few of those users all clustered together in a place like London, you are going to have a pretty congested network, and if I am outside of London, I better hope I am in a 4G coverage area. So if I am any of the customers I have mentioned above, than I am hoping that EE would be using this to help finance the building out of their network infastructure.
British Operator EE Offers £8 Million Petabyte 4G Data Bundle
£8 for a million petabytes? I'll take two.
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