An increasing number of parents around the country can sidestep the dreaded $400 cellphone bill boosted by their child’s texting mania, as more wireless companies begin to offer custom controls on children’s wireless usage.
AT&T Mobility announced last week that it is making parental controls available, with no special handset required and a fee of $5 per month per line. The new service, Smart Limits for Wireless, allows parents to set usage limits on talk time, text messaging, instant messaging and downloads. The service also allows management of phone use, including allocating minutes among users of family plans and restricting access to the mobile Web. Parents can block calls from certain numbers and filter access to inappropriate content, and the online nature of the controls allows parents to change the limits whenever they choose.
AT&T Mobility parent company AT&T Inc. offers similar parental management controls for its high-speed Internet, home phone and video service.
The move by AT&T Mobility represents the first time a national carrier has offered parents a way to control children’s usage on a postpaid, shared-minute plan. T-Mobile USA Inc. introduced a sort of hybrid offer called kidConnect last June, which limits children’s wireless bills to $20 per month, but always allows in-network calling with the parent’s phone.
Among other major carriers, Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel Corp. have limited their options for parents to GPS handset tracking.
ACE*COMM Corp. provides its Parent Patrol product to carriers as a white-label solution. The company has several deployments in place and is in conversations with nearly 30 carriers around the world that want to offer control features, according to Jonje Sena, VP of marketing for valued-added services. In North America, he added, most operators are interested and some are in the advanced stages of choosing a solution.
Cost not main concern
Parents aren’t only worried about cost, Sena said-in many cases, they’re more concerned about safety and access to inappropriate content.
“This is more about parenting, control and discipline-it’s not just about the cost,” Sena said.
However, implementing parental controls isn’t necessarily simple for operators, Sena warned. A company has to make detailed decisions on how it wants the service to work: how blocked calls and text messages will be billed, for example, and whether users on either end will be notified that a call or message has been blocked.
When mobile virtual network operator Disney Mobile launched in the spring of 2006, the company put parental controls at the heart of its offering.
“We really don’t see this as a surprise,” said Mark Cregan, VP of marketing for Disney Mobile, of the increased carrier interest in parental controls. He said that prior to the MVNO’s launch, their research showed that control features-especially monitoring usage and being able to set limits-was critical to Disney Mobile’s family niche.
“We feel like our model is getting qvalidated all the time, but having said that, we ultimately think there is a need out there. It’s not just a copy-cat situation,” said Cregar.
Kids in control
Although companies like AT&T Mobility and Disney Mobile have largely taken the parents’ side and stressed control in marketing their offering, MVNO kajeet Inc. is aligning itself on the side of kids.
Daniel Neal, co-founder and CEO of kajeet, emphasizes its features as “customization” rather than control. He said that the company’s pre-launch research-which included a beta test with about 7,000 users-showed that families don’t want to have to dole out minutes and messages, but want better ways to control overall spending without unexpected fees.
He also pointed out that in kajeet’s model, parents control how much their children can spend, but the service allows kids greater freedom in deciding what to spend that money on: voice minutes, messaging or downloads. Parents don’t only want to control their children’s usage, Neal said-they want wireless use to help teach responsibility.
As for the timing of the trend, Neal said, “Kids are more important than they used to be. . They’re smart, they’re savvy, and in some areas they’re leading the way in terms of wireless services consumption, so they need to be taken very seriously.”
While other companies are emphasizing parents’ ability to block certain users from reaching a child, Neal said, there are “plenty of kids who are very careful about who they want to get messages or phone calls from.” And, he added, kids don’t want their phone confiscated at school any more than their parents do.
Neal also noted that helping families control their spending means, at least to kajeet, adjusting expectations for average revenue per user.
Major carriers, he said, have typically offered “family plans that are not family friendly. They were designed for Wall Street, not Main Street. . If [carriers] didn’t have to deliver to Wall Street a $60 ARPU, maybe they would have done something better and more fair and more friendly for families. But they couldn’t, and they didn’t.”
