世論 What Japan Thinks

I’m yet to go pake-hodai in Japan; pake-hodai, or パケ放題, is the DoCoMo trademarked (I think) term which means as many data packets as you want, but it has passed into the language as the generic term for fixed rate plans. However, if this survey recently reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by Marsh into fixed-price cellphone data packet plans is to be believed, almost three in five Japanese pay a fixed amount per month for their data.

Demographics

Between the 6th and 10th of March 2008 300 members of the Marsh online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. Exactly 50:50 of the sample were male and female, 20.0% were in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 13.3% in their fifties, and 6.7% in their sixties.

These all-you-can-eat deals have two rather expensive exceptions to their coverage; first is using the cellphone as a modem – this gets charged at normal call rates, and second is the so-called full browser, a more fully-featured browser that can view standard computer-targeted sites in all their glory – to get these packets for free, you need to upgrade your plan to one covering the full browser too.

Research results

First, 7 people in the sample did not carry mobile phones. They were eliminated and the remaining 293 were asked the following questions.

Q1: Do you use a fixed-price packet plan for your mobile phone? (Sample size=293)

Yes (to SQs)	59.4%
No	35.5%
Don’t know	5.1%

The most common plan was DoCoMo’s pake-hodai, with 35.6% of the fixed-price plan users using it. Next was au’s double teigaku light with 29.3%, then au’s double teigaku with 14.9%, then SoftBank’s packet shi-hodai, or unlimited packet discount.

Q1SQ1: What sort of data services do you often use? (Sample size=174, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Viewing web sites	119	68.4%
Picture attachments in mail	107	61.5%
Text mail	97	55.7%
Downloading ring tones	76	43.7%
Downloading software	58	33.3%
Viewing PC sites with full browser	46	26.4%
Downloading video	40	23.0%
Decoration mail	38	21.8%
Using mobile phone as modem for computer	26	14.9%
Downloading books, comics	18	10.3%
Other	1	0.6%

Q1SQ2: Do other carriers’ fixed-price packet plans look attractive to you? (Sample size=174)

Yes	28.7%
No	71.3%