UNTETHERING THE BUNDLE

Verizon Wireless has untied its Vcast Music service from its overall Vcast package. That may not sound revolutionary, but it holds plenty of significance. Carriers are growing wise to the fact that many data services can't be sold in a bundle. In that sense, music is at the ultimate extreme of spectrum. The reason a mobile music service is attractive is because customers can get whatever music they want whenever they want. They know they can get that same music much more cheaply by simply logging on to iTunes or a dozen other music services at home. So it's a conscious choice they're making to pay more, and a multimedia bundle of carrier-selected content costing a double-digit monthly service charge is antithetical to that mindset.

Not that all bundles are bad or will fail, but it seems in these budding days of wireless data usage, customers are more interested in trying out individual services rather than paying a recurring fee for a package of services they don't yet know if they have use for. According to M:Metrics, T-Mobile is leading U.S. carriers in MMS penetration with almost 20% of its user base sending picture messages. The first operator to promote picture messaging, Sprint, is five percentage points behind, and that's likely because it bundles picture messaging with its Vision data plans. Some day people will see the value in huge data service bundles and at that point operators can sell it like cable. But before that can happen, customers need to see the value in individual items and the only way is to sell the services a la carte.