Australian Financial Review: How the smartphone has changed our world (for better or worse)

WhistleOut Publisher Joe Hanlon, talks to John Davidson from the Financial Review about how the introduction of large data plans changed the marketplace:

There was a clear moment in 2015/2016 when the data included in plans skyrocketed.

"Whereas you might have expected plans to include 2GB or 3GB of data, we were suddenly seeing 50GB or 100GB for the same price," he says.

Rather than being encouraged to pay less for the same amount of data, users were being encouraged to pay the same but use their phone more than ever, and for data intensive apps (such as video streaming) they'd never considered before due to the high per-gigabit cost of data.

Just why this happened is something of a chicken-and-egg question, the chicken being the rise and rise of new smartphone operators in the middle of the decade; and the egg being the sudden popularity of video streaming services such as Netflix.

In 2010, WhistleOut had six smartphone service providers in its plan comparison database. By 2015, when the data explosion happened, there were four times that many, says Hanlon.

"Mobile data was the key lever the telcos used to lure customers to their services," he says.

"There really isn't much else to differentiate the majority of the telcos. All they can do is tweak the ratio between what you pay and how much data you get.

"This wasn't a dynamic unique to Australia," says Hanlon. "Mobile network operators in the US countered the flood of low-cost competitors into the market with unlimited data offers that the smaller companies couldn't afford to replicate, and it's a similar story in European markets with a strong reseller presence, like Germany, France and Spain."