Amazon Says No Current Plan to Bundle Mobile Tariff with Prime
Internet retail and streaming giant Amazon is reportedly in the very early stages of exploring whether or not to add a Mobile phone service as an extra feature of their paid Prime membership, which already offers limited music streaming, cheaper deliveries, video streaming, Kindle books and various other benefits.
At this stage all the rumours point to Amazon’s US division potentially doing a deal with Verizon, T-Mobile or the Dish Network to offer a basic low-cost Pay Monthly (SIM-Only) plan – inclusive for Prime customers as part of a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) agreement, while non-Prime users would pay $10 a month.
Given Amazon’s position in the wider consumer market, such a move would be significant and could eventually spread to other countries, such as the UK. However, at the time of writing, all of the mentioned US mobile carriers have denied the existence of any formal talks and Amazon itself has said they “don’t have plans to add wireless at this time” (emphasis on “at this time“).
The wide circulation of related news reports suggests that this may be something Amazon have been exploring internally, but has not yet made a solid commitment to pursue. In particular, including mobile as an inclusive Prime feature is likely to be the most divisive aspect, since it’s difficult to see something like that working without a major price increase and existing Prime subscribers would then have concerns.
In any case, it could be many months, or even longer, before we learn whether this was all just a flash in the pan idea or something more tangible.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Not sure if including it within Prime is financially sustainable, when they’re blowing money on shows people don’t finish like Citadel.
In regards to network, most likely they would go with O2 right? O2 offer Prime for 6.99.
Lol if Obi is right Im sure all Amazon UK mobile customers will enjoy O2’s 4g speeds of 0.2-4mbps and O2’s 5G speeds of 40mbps!!
40 mbps on o2 5g I wish in the north east ee 3G is faster than o2 5g
Come on, Citadel is fun. There’s zero depth to it, sure, but hey, a bit of mindless entertainment.
What is Citadel’s budget? Surely nowhere near the BILLION ballpark which was the awful Amazon Rings of Power where not even 1/3 of audiences watched half of it
I get up to 60mbps on o2 4g, can’t try 5g as I don’t yet have a 5g enabled phone however I will probably get one in the near future
Sam: “Surely nowhere near the BILLION ballpark which was the awful Amazon Rings of Power where not even 1/3 of audiences watched half of it”
Perhaps Amazon should have thought that maybe there was a reason why the Silmarillion had never gotten the sales numbers of The Hobbit. Many, many years ago I ploughed through the book, out of a misplaced belief that there would be an interesting and well told story in there. When none turned up, I persevered, hoping that if I kept reading I’d find it. Instead it turned out to be a book made up solely of JRRT’s continuity notes, as interesting as the regulations on fire extinguishers. Except for the fact that the The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 comes in under 70 pages, whereas the Silmarillion drones on for over 400……
No smoke without fire, but I can’t see the MNOs being best pleased with this idea either in the US or UK.
If it does happen it’ll certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons, and it would be a good way of Amazon adding more value to Prime. At the moment Prime is largely the bundling of free next day delivery with the streaming content, but as audiences “mine out” the streaming content that offers progressively less value unless you’re happy with the speed of adding (and quality) of new content.
But maybe it will never get forward simply due to the economics – Prime is currently about £100 a year, and MVNO SIM only deals typically land in the range £7-10 a month for any credible data allowance. If a Prime SIM only deal doesn’t have sufficient benefits then it just becomes a backup SIM or one for the kids. If it does have sufficient airtime and data, then can they possibly include it without a significant price hike? Yeah, Amazon can try and monetise my phone’s data and would do that much better than the MNOs, but how much is that worth? “Look at this premium location and browsing data we’re getting boss! We know that Fred Periwinkle lives at the same address he’s already given us as his Amazon delivery address, we know he normally catches the bus from that address in Smethwick to Dudley five days each week, he checks the sports news for Wolves football club most days whilst on the bus and looks at the Daily Mirror for news, but has never clicked on an article about Philip Schofield. We’re minted, we can sell this data to everyone!”
Agreed.
Most of the other features I hardly use on my Prime subscription, it’s the free next day deliveries that I mainly use it for. I don’t imagine it’s economically viable for them to bundle a mobile tariff with Prime, plus some of the other mobile networks would probably dislike that.
Might actually make prime worth getting.
hmm ok not bad. always makes me laugh when yanks call mobile service “wireless” though.
Do we still care about antitrust laws? If for example Amazon exploited their dominance in online retail to reward people with mobile data based on how much they spent with Amazon, would that come onto the radar of the CMA?
We certainly do care about competition law, and the CMA have been very active on a whole range of cases (search their web site, look down the page “News and communications”. But, I can’t see that an possible Amazon MNO offer would be anti-competitive any more than other incentives based on how much you spend, and when it comes to tiered discounts, incentives and non-transparent bundle pricing, the MNOs and large ISPs have done that for a very long time.
And I doubt that’s how they’d structure such an offer, if only because the net margins they make on own-account products sales vary from wafer thin to negative. Arguably that’s something the CMA should be looking at, but don’t hold your breath.
I’d rather they rolled back the stupid Amazon music ‘improvements’. My young kids still don’t get why they can no longer just ask Alexa for the same song 10+ times in a day and no longer get it after the second play. (Selling a down grade as a feature is marketing at its worst).
Or if they added video support to Amazon photos (what’s the point in unlimited photo storage if there is no video storage included).
My suspicion is all these prime perks exist for upselling now and the value of prime is dropping (Amazon music subscription/Amazon cloud storage in reference to the above points.). I’d suspect the free mobile would be for a tiny amount of data trying to get you to subscribe for unlimited data for X a month.
blocking kids from playing the same song 10+ times a day? I’d be begging for that feature
Ordinarily I’d agree with you but having the two kids whine and moan why Alexa no longer listens is worse… (The oldest is aware of the free trial for Amazon music unlimited and regularly asks why we don’t sign up – prime is working as intended for Amazon. Just need to cancel it now.)
I get a good deal from Smarty, so not planning on changing, unless Vodapoop and three merges.