Aussie users appear to be scaling back on mobile browsing to save money. Have you cut your phone Internet fix?
Simon Canning at the Australian reports that AIMIA’s quarterly tracking of mobile data usage shows a major drop in the first two months of this year — a trend which AIMIA attributes to the global financial crisis.
While there’s no doubt that data rates can be a rort (especially in the Australian market), it’s also true that once you’ve got the mobile browsing habit, it’s hard to break. So we’re wondering: have you cut back on your overall mobile browsing? Gotten smarter about which sites you visit? Or just shifted to a better plan? Share your mobile money methodology in the comments.
Mobile browsing slumps due to downturn [The Australian]
Kieran Lord
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 3:15 PMWhat I’ve done is make a series of tiny on/off toggle plugins in firefox using jetpack to enable and disable parts of webpages (image, embed, etc tags for instance) to cut back on usage when I’m on the mobile plan. It works quite well for the most part.
Sarah
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 3:20 PMThe Best tip I can give anyone – is to turn images off.
My Nokia browser lets me do that – why should I pay for logo and ad downloads.
My phone browsing went from $30-40 a month to $1-3 for daily checking of email/news /rss
poedgirl
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 4:25 PMI haven’t cut down at all, in fact, I’ve increased my usage. Mobile data is fairly cheap now days – well, just for browsing anyway.
CraigS
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 4:50 PMI only ever use free WiFi connections to get email or browse the web. Data rates are still way too high and there will never be any incentive to use the telcos data packages for me until they bring rates down to reasonable levels.
David Jackmanson
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 5:09 PMTwo words. Opera Mini.
It strips out everything except text and low quality pics so I browse all I like on my extortionate 10c a meg prepaid plan. If I really really need to watch a vid or use a Flash site I switch to the Skyfire browser which handles everything.
JessT
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 5:21 PMCosts me $1.30 for 60kB!
I started to use my phone to do internet banking. When I found out the cost (by not having any credit left), I vowed to never use it again, and have stuck with my word.
Rodney Fiddaman
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 8:27 PMI’m with you, Craig. It’s either my own home wifi, free wifi or an absolute emergency (like locating my wife).
Stephen Ridgway
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 8:49 PMI like using my allocation for push/fetch e-mail so I don’t have to use SMS too often.
Andrew Demczuk
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 9:51 PM$545 over 3 months club here =(
Adam Reynolds
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 at 10:25 PMWith tethering now available on the iPhone, I have now cancelled my Telstra 3G contract. So…I still browse as much, its just costs me heaps less (i.e. there is less revenue for the phone companies).
ebi
Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 12:08 AMFor reasons I still can’t understand I’m with Telstra and considering that they don’t seem to care what their competitors do I don’t like to take the risk with their 100MB/month plan. Due to the unusual bills I was getting I’ve installed software to track my usage and disable data connections. If you want to actually use your smartphone, stay as far away from Telstra as you possibly can.
/rant