Mobile operators are struggling to find the right balance in their pricing models between simple sophistication and complexity while managing capacity to better effect.

Telcos are still enforcing limits on data plans rather than using the opportunity to upsell to their best customers, according to a report on mobile data charging by Allot Communications. Almost half (48 percent) of the companies they researched are still applying curbs on overages. The survey was carried out during the third quarter of 2011 and the report is based on data collected from public sources, from over 100 mobile telcos across Asia Pacific, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Africa and North America.

The report examines the move from unlimited data plans (almost wholly eliminated at this point), through today’s volume-based pricing and towards tomorrow’s more value-based pricing, providing a snapshot of where the industry currently is on its journey. The conclusion seems to be that while many operators are lagging, some are innovating with ‘time of day’ pricing, application bundling and partnering with over the top players.

Of the 38.5 percent of operators that still offer ‘unlimited’ data plans, only 13.5 percent are genuinely unlimited, with some form of ‘fair usage’ policy governing the rest. The majority of those companies sampled now offer a volume capped data plan - on either postpaid or prepaid usage - and this is twice as popular as time and volume or throughput caps.

The reaction to the overage problem is worrying and hopefully short term. Fully 70 percent of telcos researched charge an overage penalty by metering usage beyond a customer’s limit, normally at very high cost. 48 percent throttle the speed beyond the cap and 12 percent impose a ‘hard cap’ for customers, not allowing any data usage until the next billing cycle. Encouragingly though, 32 percent offer a volume top up service, which can see customers through until the next billing cycle.

The big problem with volume based plans is that 60 percent of mobile data users do not know what their cap is, 75 percent do not know how much bandwidth they had used and 40 percent do not know what happened if they exceeded their limit. This must cast the operator in a bad light when caps of any kind are ‘suddenly’ and unexpectedly imposed.

There is news good news, though. Some service providers are beginning to innovate. Zero rating plans, that allow ‘free’ access to specific sites, such as Facebook or Skype for mobile are becoming popular, as are plans that cover multiple devices. Happy hour, or time shifting options are being offered to some groups of users – for instance, virtually unlimited data between 2.00 a.m. and 6.00 a.m. during the month of Ramadan or unlimited usage during the morning rush hour, courtesy of Orange in the UK.

Although obviously attractive to customers, these time shifting plans are also useful to telcos addressing the problems of overloaded networks. According to Vodafone, off peak network utilization is only 35 percent across Europe and according to Senza Fili Consulting this figure is likely to be even lower in the States.