Singapore's SingTel has introduced tiers of mobile broadband service in an effort to curb HSPA network congestion.
Those subscribers willing to pay for the company's Priority Pass offerings, will receive priority for their data traffic when the network is heavily loaded. Priority pass is available for those customers paying for the operator's 7.2 Mbps and 21 Mbps mobile broadband plans. It also offers a "classic" plan that puts data speeds at peak rates of 3.6 Mbps with no priority access.
"Priority Pass is a game-changer that will give our mobile services the edge over our competitors," said Yuen Kuan Moon, SingTel's executive vice president of digital consumer, in a release. "In the last year, we have seen a sharp rise in mobile data usage with the explosive growth of new web-enabled devices and bandwidth-hungry multimedia applications. We launched Priority Pass to cater to the rapidly growing number of customers who are demanding higher speeds with more consistent performance."
Tiered pricing plans are envisioned for new LTE networks. Most operators in the 3G world are combating data network congestion via data caps and network techniques such as offloading data onto Wi-Fi or throttling data traffic.
SingTel is aiming to introduce LTE services by the end of 2011.
For more:
- see this Cellular-News article
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