Three Mobile’s CEO Dave Dyson says Three Mobile, the country’s fourth largest mobile network operator, is well positioned to take advantage of user’s increasing hunger for data.
Hutchison-Whampoa, Three’s owner, released its financial figures this morning, which showed an increase in customers of nearly 1 million.
This included a 48% increase in non-voice ARPU (average revenue per user), namely, text and data services.
Dyson said that the company’s strategy as ‘the only network built so far that has focused on the internet’, has been a success on the back of its ‘all you can eat’ data plans, such as the One Plan. He claims his network is the only network that allows any handset, on any plan to have access to unlimited data options..
The company has seen a sharp spike in data usage per customer to 1.1Gb per user, ‘more than double’ this time last year.
Dyson stresses that this is not a core niche of early adopters, but the average of the 4.5 million consumers across the whole network. Those on high end Apple and Android devices average even more, at 1.5Gb per month. This is where Dyson thinks the rest of the market will go too.
"We are seeing phenomenal growth, and a phenomenal shift in consumer behaviour," Dyson said.
Dyson refused to discuss the company’s future 4G plans, and how this might affect these figures.
The company did well to pre-empt the shift to data services through its tie up with MBNL – a network sharing joint venture with T-Mobile (now a part of Everything Everywhere).
The company has spent £95 million on infrastructure upgrades in the last half year, and Dyson said that the company is more than prepared to handle data growth if it continues at the same pace.
"Our network is standing up to every test that our customers are throwing at it."
