Mobile broadband Pricing usage based or unlimited usage. AT&T in USA changed its offering from unlimited to usage based.

With mobile internet access to contents and applications through smart phones and laptop on exponential surge, mobile operators are put to task on planning capacity.

According to stats 10% usage of traffic is to social networking sites facebook, twitter and 15 % is to Youtube downloads. Skype accounts for 5% traffic.
Applications like facebook and twitter are not bandwidth hungry whereas video downloads from Youtube consumes bandwidth. Imagine if facebook adds video and bandwidth hungry applications.

Application and mobile phone behaviour becomes important on mobile networks. Improper application and low cost handset in market are not optimized to provide effective utilzation of resources. This will be big challenge in developing market in india. Providers of mobile handset like Blackberry claim their handset provides optimized performance with effective utilization of limited resources.
Should applications and mobile handset who have optimized performance be penalized against applications and mobile handset provides who are not optimized in performance.

AT&T in USA launched unlimited plans and exlusive iPhone. iPhone provides true touch screen experience to end user in using smartphones. This created explosive growth of traffic on AT&T network. With AT&T announcement to remove unlimited plan and introduce usage based plan any indicator for future tariff plans. Sprint and T Mobile has not planned to change its plan. At the same time AT&T plan has benefit of low price.

Is exclusive iPhone with AT&T at risk and Apple strategy to offer exlusive with operators right startegy ?

Usage based tariff plans will mean educating customers on handset and application behaviour. This will be bonus for applications and mobile handset which are efficient.

Handling unlimited offers needs to be evaluated in developed market whereas developing market will start with unlimited and will mature in tariff plan as explonential growth will happen.
Other way is to provide unlimted offering on less hungry application and usage based charge on hungry applications.