Poll on Japanese mobile pay site usage
infoPLANT recently published a survey that looked into the usage of fee-charging mobile phone sites. The fieldwork for the self-selecting survey was conducted over a week from the 3rd to 10th of April 2007.
Demographics
5,207 people chose to fill out a public questionnaire available through the NTT DoCoMo iMode menuing system. 39.4% of the sample was male, 3.2% in their teens, 31.0% in their twenties, 43.4% in their thirties, 19.0% in their forties, and 3.4% aged fifty or older.
This survey is notable for one figure I’d been hoping to find in regards to infoPLANT, namely how many of their respondents are on fixed-price data programs, or パケ放題, pakehoudai, plans as they are known in Japanese. This survey had five in six of the respondents on these deals. This higher than I expected figure should always be borne in mind when reading future or past infoPLANT self-selecting iMode surveys, as this class of user does not need to worry about, for instance, the rather horrendously large bill that can be run up downloading an audio track; nearly 9,000 yen on a standard plan for a 5 megabyte audio file, and still around 450 yen on DoCoMo’s best discounted packet deals. Investigating further, the percentage of customers who have unlimited packet plans was around 27% as of September 2006 (see page 27) and about 30% at the end of 3Q 2006 (31st December 2006) (see page 2), so one can see the bias inherent in this kind of open survey conducted by infoPLANT.
Also note, even if you are on an unlimited packet program, if you use your mobile phone as a modem, these data packets are not free; stories have been recently circulating about people not reading the fine print correctly and running up over a million yen in data transmission charges!
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