VIENNA, March 28 (Reuters) - Telekom Austria hasannounced new mobile deals abandoning the unlimited datapackages that have become commonplace and instead offering freevoice and text messages.
The move, in Europe's most keenly-priced market, is a betthat soaring data usage can replace dwindling revenues from theformer cash cows of voice and texts, which are coming underpressure from Web-based competitors.
Telekom Austria said on Thursday it would offer only the newtariffs after existing contracts ran out.
Mobile operators all over Europe are seeking ways to makedata pay, as smartphone users send more and morebandwidth-hungry video over the airwaves, while so-calledover-the-top Web services like What's App and Viber offer freecalls and texts that sidestep mobile operators altogether.
"The mobile telecoms market is changing Europe-wide at afurious pace," Telekom Austria Chief Executive HannesAmetsreiter said.
"Over-the-top players are using an infrastructure in whichthey are not investing with their messaging and voice services -to the detriment of mobile companies and their customers."
Vodafone, Telenor and Swisscom are among those experimenting with new ways to charge customersin an effort to combat a drop in European phone bills estimatedby Sanford Bernstein at 15 percent since 2007.
Austria, with mobile deals starting at 7 euros per month,has been Europe's most competitive market, partly because fouroperators until recently fought over a population of just 8.4million, and partly due to early price regulation.
The consolidation of the market to three players at thestart of this year is expected to bring some easing of ayears-long price war. T-Mobile Austria raised pricesfor new contracts earlier this month.
From Tuesday, all new Telekom Austria mobile customers willbe offered packages starting from 19.90 euros ($25.43) per monthfor existing fixed-line customers to 59.90 euros for mobile-onlycustomers wanting the highest volume and speeds for mobile data.
That compares with the operator's average revenue per userof 17.50 euros in Austria in the fourth quarter.
The cheapest package includes 1 gigabyte of data at adownload speed of 4 megabits per second, sufficient for a coupleof hours a day on Facebook but only approximately enough for asingle movie, which would take about an hour to download.
The most expensive offers 5 gigabytes at a download speed of42 megabits per second, and all the new tariffs includeunlimited voice, text, and apps from Telekom Austria's partnerVodafone for photo and document storage, contacts and security.
"With the new tariffs there is no reason any more to switchto free services with often doubtful quality," Ametsreiter said.
Telekom Austria will still offer basic packages starting at9.90 euros with just 100 megabytes of data for customers withoutsmartphones who only want to call and text.
Vodafone (VOD)