Half of Americans would cut mobile data to trim expenses

Forty-eight percent of Americans said they would drop their mobile [1]data plan completely if circumstances dictated they must reduce household expenditures, according to a new consumer study published by Strategy Analytics' Multiplay Market Dynamics service.

Posed with the scenario "Imagine that, due to household budgetary constraints, you have to reduce home entertainment /communications services expenses," only 10 percent of respondents said they would halt their home broadband subscription, while 12 percent said they would eliminate digital television and 19 percent would sacrifice mobile voice services.

"Given the extraordinary importance consumers place on home broadband, we fully expected broadband to have a high ‘keep rate,'" said Strategy Analytics Multiplay Market Dynamics Service director Ben Piper in a prepared statement. "What surprised us was the vulnerability of mobile services."

Under the same scenario, 17 percent of respondents told Strategy Analytics they would scale back to a lower mobile data tier, 33 percent said they would leave their service unchanged and 2 percent said they would upgrade to a higher tier. At the same time, only 21 percent of broadband subscribers said they would scale back to a lower tier, and 2 percent would move to a higher tier. "These results suggest that, while American consumers consider home broadband service to be a vital utility, they see mobile data service as simply a ‘nice to have,'" said Strategy Analytics Digital Consumer Practice vice president David Mercer in a statement.

For more on the Strategy Analytics study:
- read this release [2]
- check out this data [1]

Related articles:
Almost 100 percent of iPhone owners use mobile data [3]
U.S. mobile data [4] revenues grow to $34 billion in 2008