Inmarsat raises prices again – by how much depends on who you talk to
Yes it’s that time again. There’s snow in the air, frost on the ground and Inmarsat is raising its prices. But just as last year, there is a need to divine some facts from the sales messages of its competitors.
There will be a longer piece on this subject in due course but for now, initial conversations with Inmarsat and others about the scale and extent of the price increases and their implications have yielded the following.
Some prices are indeed rising. On the Standard (pay as you go) 10MB plan, the approx $150 (retail) price a month price is the same as 2012 (when it rose from $100). What goes up is the per megabyte cost over that 10MB allowance, from $12 to $14 retail from March 1, 2013.
So it’s not so much pay as you go but pay if you want to. If you chose to use that plan for 40MB of data then as I understand it, you’d pay $150 for the first 10MB of data plus $14 per MB thereafter.
Clearly Inmarsat’s intent is to encourage customers off PAYG and onto the 200MB Entry plan, which retails around the $800 per month mark and gives much lower per megabyte rates. But are many owners using PAYG for their day-to-day communications? If so they really would be costing themselves money unnecessarily.
Inmarsat has already been upfront that it doesn’t like FB being used as a backup for VSAT and that’s also a motivation for increasing the per MB price on PAYG this time.
I also understand that prices for Inmarsat Fleet (also pay as you go) data will go up 10% from March 1 but the other E&E services, Inmarsat-B and mini-M stay the same. Inmarsat blames the cost of maintaining the I-3 and I-4 network for that.
As I understand it there are no price increases on the other bundles, 2GB, 6GB and All You Can Eat.
The other point to note is that the 25MB or 50MB bundles offered by Inmarsat distribution partners (including Stratos which it owns) are not being withdrawn – at least not by Inmarsat. These are put together by partners, including Stratos among others, from the Inmarsat Pay As You Go (Standard) plan, so if they wanted to keep offering them they could do. But since Inmarsat doesn’t market these it’s a bit of a moot point.
More to come on this subject and I’m looking forward to the debate at DigitalShip Hamburg. Let’s hope we can have it on its merits and let users decide – after all they are the ones with the buying power.