Mobile app developers welcome T-Motion charges

OXFORD, United Kingdom—The recent news that T-Motion, the mobile portal division of Deutsche Telekom, will charge Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) users for certain previously free mobile data services has been praised by mobile application developers. T-Motion is the first European mobile portal to start charging end users, with tariffs being applied specifically to entertainment applications and financial information.
This move, according to one WAP application developer, will now see them gaining a share in the revenue stream from users accessing the services and provide them with a real incentive to enhance applications. However, T-Motion will only be sharing up to 50 percent of these revenues, significantly less than the 90 percent passed on to content providers by Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo, whose i-mode service has more than 24 million subscribers and is widely cited as the model for a successful network. T-Motion said it expected its mobile portal service to break even by 2003.
Mobile application developers have struggled to attract meaningful venture capital, while they lacked a clear business model to gain a share of end-user revenues. Some analysts claim this move by T-Motion is a major break in the ranks from other European mobile operators and could force others to follow its example. The company said it would start charging in Germany, its biggest market, before moving to markets such as the United Kingdom and Austria.