Originally Posted by MTUK1:
“Three never actively promoted tethering and the 1000GB limit.”
This is revisionist history at it's finest.
In early 2010 the concept of "The One Plan" was created by Marc Allera as a way to create an "all rounder" package that would increase the number of subscribers across the business in order to hit their target of 10 million customers.
What they wanted to do was create a high value plan that would be above all others and in many ways would be a no brainer for the average consumer. What this means is that if a customer had a choice between a £20 plan and a £30 plan they wanted the customer to choose the £30 plan purely because of all the added value they were getting. Also they wanted to give customers a unique reason to join them.
Later in 2010 once the risks were calculated the full One Plan launched with unlimited data (up from 1GB) and tethering was advertised as included with the plan.
Quote:
“With the One plan you can also connect your phone to other devices to get onto the internet. This is called tethering or using your phone as modem.”
Three had worked out that they would be able to support a 60% jump in data usage every year and still support the One Plan and by keeping the One Plan as the highest priced and only tariff to include tethering it meant that margin was good for Three who were able to profit off the plan.
Now of course at the time Three wasn't really expecting many people to use more than 80GB so placed a soft cap here, once people started hitting 80GB they moved it up to 450GB then eventually 1000GB. This high margin proposition propelled Three forward in allowing them to invest in their network and increase the number of users towards 10 million. Tools like trafficsense were actually very good in managing the network but ultimately it did start to get a bit out of hand where a significant amount of data was being used by a small portion of users.
Once the target was hit there was a lot of pressure from Hong Kong for Three to remain profitable and start cutting back in a lot of areas. A number of changes were made internally, one of them being the removal of the one plan with unlimited tethering. The reasons behind this were as follows.
1. Data usage was increasing and forecasted to increase further.
2. Pressure from the parent company in wanting Three to move more towards premium value added brand rather than budget. It's why AYCE is still there as a selling point but tethering is limited. There was a lot of pressure to monetise data more hence the tiered plans + limited tethering + price increases.
Going back to the original point, Tethering was pushed as a feature, as was using as much data as you want. It was an integral part of getting customers to buy into the plan. Three insisted they'd never stop selling the one plan but at the end of the day they had to in order to add value to their network.