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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (45672)	12/27/2001 11:49:55 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Wireless Report A Family Affair for Mobile Phones By David Orenstein business2.com It's Christmas morning at the Jones house, and four wrapped presents -- all exactly the same size and shape -- rest neatly under the tree. Just a bit after 7 a.m., two coffee-sipping parents and two bleary-eyed teens converge to open what turns out to be a set of new cell phones, complete with a "family plan" of 600 shared minutes per month. You can bet this scene was played out in thousands of homes this week. Family wireless calling plans -- in which family members get one bill, share one pool or "bucket" of minutes, and get to call each other's cell phones for free -- are becoming more popular: Carriers like Verizon and AT&T Wireless are offering free phones with their plans, and 5.9 million subscribers have already signed up. Strategis Group, a research firm, projects that the number of family-plan subscribers in the U.S. will increase fivefold, to 29 million, by 2004. By contrast, individual subscribers will increase only 26 percent during the next three years, from 123.8 million to 156.2 million. Family plans offer convenience (what family of four wants four bills?) and a way for parents to easily monitor cell-phone usage. Teens might smart at the loss of independence, but it's hard to argue with having Mom and Dad foot the bill. Besides, prepaid minutes -- the other popular option for teens -- can run out. Getting cut off from calls is a far worse fate than sharing minutes with your sister. The benefits for families may be convincing, but they're murkier for the carriers. With wireless growth slowing, carriers face pressure to boost revenue per subscriber. If members of a family really stick to the plan -- staying within their minutes and mostly just calling each other -- carriers could see lower average revenue per user, says Strategis analyst Adam Guy. But by promoting family plans, carriers are thinking longer-term. By capturing entire families as customers, they can later ply those households with add-on services like ring tones, text messaging, and one day, perhaps, downloadable MP3s. "There could be a lot of revenues down the road," Guy says. For carriers, the family plan could be the gift that keeps on giving.