Clear pricing transparency is good customer service

You might think that having use of a USB broadband modem free of charge is the equivalent of a license to print money.

After all, why worry about the costs of going online via the cellular network when you don’t have to pay the bill?

Well, I’m sure the folk at mobile operator 3 and 3mobilebuzz will be pleased to know that my use of 3’s Huawei E169G USB broadband modem has been quite minimal since I got it to use and experiment with in early April.

That’s not to say that I don’t think about costs. I do, every time I go online with it which is typically when I’m mobile with my laptop.

Even if there’s wifi around, I tend to use the modem (remember, I am testing it out).

I think about costs - and I have absolutely no sure way of knowing how much a given online session will have cost.

I can get an idea of how much time I’ve been online at any given moment, and how much data has flowed back and forth.

That kind of information is tracked and displayed in the modem manager application you see pictured here that you run in order to use the modem and get online with it.

Quite useful information, in fact, even if a little mental arithmetic is required to make some sense of it all.

In this example, I can see that I was online in my most recent session for a bit over 15 minutes.

I can also see that the total time I’ve been online since installing this modem on this particular laptop is a little over 5 hours and 41 minutes.

And I can see that total data sent comes to 11,046.94Kb while data received is 43,246.45Kb, making a total amount of data traffic as 54,293.39Kb.

A bit convoluted, it seems to me. When I’m looking at data allowances as gigabytes, I want to understand that more easily as a proportion of my data allowance depending on the plan I’m on.

The total looks like 543Mb, to round it up. Is that right?

And is that how I should be seeing it? As a total?

This is all great but what should also be somewhere on a screen in the application is how much all this is costing.

I’d like to see this application show me what tariff I’m on, whether it’s a contract or pay-as-you-go, and how much I’m paying (well, I’m not, but if I were a normal customer I would be).

It should also show me how much I’ve got left of my data allowance for the month, before surcharges kick in (and it should tell me how much those surcharges are).

A little multi-coloured bar graph would do the trick.

Maybe I could see all this stuff if I went online to 3’s website somewhere. But I want to see this kind of account information before I go online.

Even if the information comes with loads of disclaimers, that’s fine. I want some clue of where I stand with my account each time I load up the software.

When I connect, the software should check my account online and update the local account information before I disconnect.

And it should keep that data on the USB stick or on the inserted SIM card, not on the computer, so that I always have the account information to hand if I connect with another computer.

Security and data protection issues to consider, too, but how difficult can this all be to implement? Surely not that difficult?

I don’t think any other mobile operator provides such information, but correct me if I’m wrong. And if I am wrong, 3, please catch up.

To my mind, being transparent with pricing includes this kind of added value service. Good for relationships and loyalty, especially if no one else is doing it.

And on pricing generally, I see that from tomorrow May 1, 3 has dropped the price for its pay-as-you-go offering by 50 percent, from just under £100 to just under £50.

That’s really great, but I’d still want to see my account information before I connect.