Sutel Proposes Download Charge Rather Than Spedd For Mobile Internet

How's that now hat the Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones de Costa Rica (SUTEL) is preparing a change to mobile (cellular) internet by allowing operators to charge by download and speed?

Currently, all three mobile operators charge a fee for connection depending on speed no matter how much you download.

But that may soon change.

The La Nacion reports that the telecom regulator has already worked out a fee structure, indicating a cost of ¢0.0076 colones per kilo byte (Kb) downloaded.

For instance, this page roughly 28Kb, browsing through all the pages of today's edition of Inside Costa Rica is about 1Mb or 1000Kb, for a cost of ¢7.76 colones. Not much on its own, but in the larger grand scheme if you add up all the bytes of each website visited in each session - and most user engage many sessions daily - each colon adds up and takes a bite out of your wallet.

What about downloading an online movie on your cellphone or tablet? Or large volumes of emails and with attachments?

Although the intention of the change is to affect only prepaid services, in reality all SUTEL rates - at least to date - are both equally applied to prepaid and postpaid services.

According to the SUTEL, the change is to allow diversification of services in the marketplace.

However, it may also be a response to the complaints by the operators who have found that "unlimited" downloading for a daily, weekly or monthly fee has their networks oversaturated and causing connectivity problems.

With the change will come different plans for internet use, based on volume of use and not the connection speed.

A public hearing will be held by the SUTEL on August 7th at 5;15pm in the auditorium of the Autoridad Reguladora de los Servicios Públicos (Aresep) and will be transmitted live to regional centres.