Bradley de Souza

Launched in February 2006 to much critical acclaim and then winning awards for best network tariff year after year, T-Mobile’s Flext price plan leads the mobile phone industry.

2 years on and there’s still no sign of competition from any of the other UK mobile operators, despite Flext’s popularity with customers of all ages.

So why no competition?

Flext turns traditional mobile billing models upside down, offering the customer total flexibility when it comes to any kind of phone use, be it phone calls, SMS, MMS, even email and web usage. The customer is given a notional cash allowance based on the size of the contracted monthly payment. This allowance can then be used in any fashion, more or less calls, more or less SMS, etc. No restrictions.

The UK mobile phone market is saturated to say the least. It’s hugely competitive, with operators simply peddling hard to maintain the status quo. The Flext price plan represents a tremendous challenge for the arcane, creaking and frankly obsolete billing platforms in use by the operators. Most run on mainframes with double digit ages, and fully maxed out running 24/7.

The question for the operator is, Where to invest the money? The billing system (big expense, upheaval, good chance of failure) or compete on price point and desirable phone ranges?

The answer unfortunately is the latter. Operators have suffered huge problems in the past with billing upgrades, capacity issues, adding new elements like MMS and web usage, all conspiring with a set of pre-existing conditions to scupper progress in this area. Instead it is commercially easier to buy exclusivity of the next best phone, be it the iPhone, HTC Diamond, N95 8GB etc. etc. Add into the mix increased contract lengths, getting longer if rumours are to be believed, and you have a perfect storm in T-Mobile’s favour.

Remarkable foresight and excellent technical execution means that Flext may not have any true competition for a few years to come.