data charges in italy

[donpedro]

Hi,

I am posting on this forum in the hope that someone here is an expert on Italian data plans and can help us out. I work for a company which has a mobile application (for S60, UIQ and WinMobile) that runs in the background and connects to the Internet (HTTP, not WAP) once per day. The app is currently available in the US and UK and we are planning to launch in Italy next.

The amount of data the application transfers is trivial. Normally 1-3KB per day. Which means that with most data plans the total data cost will be no more than €0,5-1 per month.

However, from investigation into data plans in Italy it seems that the operators there have a minimum charge per connection and/or day. In other countries the operators may have a minimum count of 1KB, but that is normally an insignificant cost. In Italy however, we’ve seen "set-up" charges of up to €0,60. Which increases the cost of running our application from €0,5-1 to €18 per month…

I would greatly appreciate feedback from this forum on whether or not my understanding of the Italian market is correct. Is this a real issue for everyone, or is it just specific operators or data plans?

Are there other data plans available that we could tell our users to subscribe to?

Any information would help. If the data costs in Italy are really this high we have no hopes of ever getting any users there.

Thanks in advance,

-don

[Effendi]

Hi Don,
the 0.60€ set-up fee applies to 3 ITA only and it's debited only after the first 12KB (if I'm not wrong) for every session (1 session expires after 30 mins) so it should not be a problem for your application.

Wind surely doesn't have any setup fee and TIM as well. The only one which could have one is Vodafone which, by default, has a per minute billing also for packet data, but you can ask to change to the usual per KB billing, I suppose with no set-up fee.

[donpedro]

Hi Effendi,

Thanks for the quick reply!
Here is some information I found on your site:

TIM: €0.20 fixed charge per session for TIM WAP Portal. €0.006/KB for Internet/HTTP – 1KB minimum.
Wind: €0.30 fixed charge per session for Wind WAP Portal. €0.003/KB for Internet/HTTP – no minimum.
3: € 0.60 connection fee, then €0.004/KB
Vodafone GPRS: € 0.30/5 min (plus € 0.50 set-up fee)
Vodafone UMTS: € 0.60/5 min (plus € 0.50 set-up fee)

So if I understand you correctly, the minimum charges for TIM and Wind are irrelevant in our case because they only apply to WAP traffic and not Internet/HTTP?

Re 3, do you know if there is any place on their site where the 12KB trigger is confirmed in writing? I found the €0.60 minimum charge in connection to use of what they call “Fast Mobile Modem” (using babelfish for translation to English…). And there was a mention of a product called Naviga3 that costs $9 per month and had a €0.15 minimum charge. One footnote I found several places mentioned that a session is considered expired after 30 minutes of inactivity. But I couldn’t find anything about the 12KB of usage for a new session to be charged.

Vodafone had a page that explains data pricing at http://www.190.it/190/trilogy/jsp/ch...y_skip_md=true. From what I can tell there is a minimum charge of €0.29 per session for Internet/HTTP traffic outside of Vodafone Live (and then €1 per 15 minutes usage).

Thanks again for your help. I have worked in the mobile industry for a long time and this Italian data plan structure is still one of the more confusing issues I’ve come across…

-don

[Effendi]

Originally Posted by donpedro

So if I understand you correctly, the minimum charges for TIM and Wind are irrelevant in our case because they only apply to WAP traffic and not Internet/HTTP?

exactly, you got the point.

Originally Posted by donpedro

Re 3, do you know if there is any place on their site where the 12KB trigger is confirmed in writing? I found the €0.60 minimum charge in connection to use of what they call “Fast Mobile Modem” (using babelfish for translation to English…). And there was a mention of a product called Naviga3 that costs $9 per month and had a €0.15 minimum charge. One footnote I found several places mentioned that a session is considered expired after 30 minutes of inactivity. But I couldn’t find anything about the 12KB of usage for a new session to be charged.

the 12KB are written nowhere, but it comes from experience. Now I'm not sure if they are still 12 or a bit less since I use 3 only with Naviga3 option (which has NO setup fees for the first 50MB/day), but I guess they still use this strange way of billing since they had many problems when they billed the 60 cents setup also when people didn't connect to internet...

Anyway let's wait and see if AndreA or other Italians can confirm it.

Originally Posted by donpedro

Vodafone had a page that explains data pricing at http://www.190.it/190/trilogy/jsp/ch...y_skip_md=true. From what I can tell there is a minimum charge of €0.29 per session for Internet/HTTP traffic outside of Vodafone Live (and then €1 per 15 minutes usage).

that's the "per minute" billing, which is actually a per 15 minutes billing, plus set-up fee, and it's really bad for your program. But you can ask Vodafone to have the per KB billing, which should be without setup fee, but I'm not sure and finding something on Vodafone website is some sort of miracle...

Originally Posted by donpedro

Thanks again for your help. I have worked in the mobile industry for a long time and this Italian data plan structure is still one of the more confusing issues I’ve come across…

that's obvious, we're in Italy!