Birdguides Bird News Anywhere. Costs. (1 Viewer)

Hi All,

Hope there are users of this service with a Vodafone Pay-as-you-talk phone. Just had my phone WAP enabled so I can use this Birdguides service which should be a real boon. One problem is I asked for the costs of WAP and I was told anything on Vodafone Live! network is free and other websites are a whopping £2.35 per megabyte! If anyone has used this with Vodafone Pay-as-you-talk can you tell me how much it has costed you on average to visit a Birdguides page?

Cheers,
Andrew.

I use Orange,and at the moment birdguides is free trial on WAP.So I have incurred no costs.

POP

Andrew said:

Hope there are users of this service with a Vodafone Pay-as-you-talk phone. Just had my phone WAP enabled so I can use this Birdguides service which should be a real boon. One problem is I asked for the costs of WAP and I was told anything on Vodafone Live! network is free and other websites are a whopping £2.35 per megabyte! If anyone has used this with Vodafone Pay-as-you-talk can you tell me how much it has costed you on average to visit a Birdguides page?

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Hi Andrew

As the developer of the Bird News Anywhere service I was interested to see your post.

I personally pay by the minute, rather than by the byte, at 10p per minute peak time. I was out birding on Saturday and probably used the service 5 or 6 times, logging in only for a minute or two each time, to check if there was anything around. My tariff (Vodafone Leisure 200) gives me 200 free minutes at weekends and in the evenings, so these connections came out of my free minutes, but even on a weekday at 10p per minute it would have cost me rather less than a pound in connection charges for the whole day.

The alternative is to pay on a per-byte basis, as your quote suggests. £2.35 per Mb might sound a lot, but the BNA service is designed so that each text-only page is small (typically around 2 Kb, a fraction of a megabyte). To do a back-of-an-envelope calculation, if we assume a visit to Bird News Anywhere entails loading 10 text-only pages of around 2Kb each (which is probably on the excessive side; a typical visit would probably require fewer page downloads than this), the cost per visit on a pay-per-byte basis would be around:

£2.35 x 10 x (2 x 1024)/(1024 x 1024)

- or about 4.5p per visit. If you bookmarked a particular page (e.g. recent reports from your county, or recent reports within 30km of your favoured location) and went straight to that page, the network costs would be even less (this assumes Vodafone don't impose a minimum charge per connection - I'll try to find out whether this is the case).

I'm hoping to upload an enhanced version of the service shortly, which will include rarity photographs (though the site is structured so you don't have to download photos unless you choose to). Anyway, a typical picture is around 20Kb so each picture would cost around the same amount to download as 10 2Kb pages, or around 4.5p again.

This of course only covers your network charges. We're still considering the subscription charge, which will be a single monthly or annual charge paid to BirdGuides in advance, and is independent of the amount you use the service. There may also be a shorter-term subscription (probably on daily basis) available for casual users and charged by premium text message. At the moment we're charging nothing for the service, so you only pay the connection charge.

Hope this helps.

Cheers
Dave Dunford

DaveD said:

this assumes Vodafone don't impose a minimum charge per connection - I'll try to find out whether this is the case

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From the Vodafone website (http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.viewPayasYouTalkTerms):

"We charge GPRS browsing sessions by KB, and round up to the next pence at the end of each browsing session."

The price per kilobyte works out at £2.35/1024 = 0.002p, so we're talking a minimum of 1p per visit.

Cheers
Dave Dunford

Hi Dave,

I was hoping you would spot this appeal and thanks for taking the trouble to answer my question. Taking the calculations into account does make it all seem a lot less daunting. I shall try it out when I get back home and report back with the costs of my experiments.

Cheers,
Andrew.

Andrew as I said earlier on Orange it is not costing me I have a pay as you go phone.

POP

POP said:

Andrew as I said earlier on Orange it is not costing me I have a pay as you go phone.

POP

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Hi Pop

I'm delighted if you're right, but a PDF document on the Orange website (http://www.orange.co.uk/service_plans/downloads/payg_services_costs.pdf)
suggests they charge Pay as You Go customers £4 per Mb for GPRS access:

"each megabyte you download costs £4 - that's approximately equal to 1200 WAP pages..."

or if you pay per minute:

"accessing services via Orange World costs 10p per minute".

I've been unable to establish if there's a minimum charge, but I suspect it's similar to Vodafone's offering as I found this statement:

"You may use GPRS on a pay as you use basis, in which case you will be charged for data you use on a per KB basis. The charges will appear on your monthly bill."

Even at £4 per megabyte or 10p per minute though, a typical visit to Bird News Anywhere will only cost a few pence.

Regards
Dave Dunford

POP,

I was in Orange (their shop) yesterday and it said in their bumpf that it was 10p per minute on Pay-as-you-go.

Right now, done the test and it is most interesting...

Went to the main home page, selected Scotland, listed ALL reports, picked out the Loch Ryan King Eider and got good info on it, picked out Loch Ryan and got a Grid Reference for it. That was about five or six pages that downloaded very quickly. The wealth of info was superb.

Guess how much that all costed me........only 3p!!!!

BIG THUMBS UP FOR THIS THING!

(Dave, how long are you running the free trial? )

Yo Andrew, was thinking of Bird News Anywhere and like you wondered if the sting in the tail would be the cost. After reading the postings I had O2 enable my phone for GRPS entered the bookmark as per Birdguides very clear instructions and "hey" I am very very impressed (enabled and tested today). My phone is on a contract so it will be interesting to see the bill at month end.

I have over the years toyed with subscribing to a pager, but being in the Merchant Navy and away from home 7-8 months of year it was not financial sense whereas this system has big potential for wherever I'm working out of along the Scottish West Coast.

Long may it remain free and thanks for the postings.

Stewart

:clap:

I use Vodaphone's old Pay As You Go tariff - the basic "All calls" - and on my WAP enabled phone, a check of my local area (I've bookmarked the Northumberland page so I can go there directly) costs about 10p, on a pay per minute basis (WAP paid for by the minute is the only option I can get on All calls).

That includes waiting for the page to load (WAP being a fair bit slower than GPRS) and having a quick browse of any particularly interesting reports.

10p? I can live with that..!

Hi Stewart,

Sadly for us it won't be free forever as they are running a trial to gain feedback and improve things then launch a product with a subscription cost. Hopefully I shall be able to afford it alongside Bird Text Alert.

Andrew said:

(Dave, how long are you running the free trial? )

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Bird News Anywhere will be available free till the end of March - after that (assuming everything is ready) we'll switch to the subscription model. We're currently thinking of offering an annual and monthly subscription (ordered and paid for in advance as you currently do with our other services) and a daily subscription for casual users (paid for by a "premium text message" billed via your mobile phone).

We haven't decided how much we're going to charge yet, before you ask It will be announced in our weekly newsletter when we do.

Cheers
Dave Dunford

That will do for me for all but the last two days of our Scottish trip! :t:

Will probably sign up for the service to save on Bird Text Alert credits if it works out economically well for me.

Andrew said:

That will do for me for all but the last two days of our Scottish trip! :t:

Will probably sign up for the service to save on Bird Text Alert credits if it works out economically well for me.

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Andrew sorry I did not get back to you.Whenever I make a call to the web page,I always check to see how much it costs,and as yet there has been no charge.I put the web address in separately,and do not go through the wap page.At the moment Orange are giving WAP service free until end of April I believe.What I cannot do is link my PDA to the phone,I have a bluetooth connection which links up with the phone but I cannot get any web pages on it.

POP

Orange will give you a free month to try WAP or GPRS and after that you have to pay. I have a monthly contract and I am paying £4 for 4mb. This means you can stay connected as long as you like and pay only for what you download/transfer.This is the GPRS thing. I used the service four or five times a day for a week while in Norfolk and barely used a 1mb. I really like it, I think I prefer it to the text alerts. I can't quite get the text alerts right, and if I am out birding I can never remember how to change the settings, plus one time I sent a message to say no more and it didn't go through and then I got another six messages come through before I could get through to turn it off. Jo

Welcome to BF Jo.

Just filled in a questionnaire for Birdguides thought of something. Does it cost someone to put stuff on the WAP network? If not then it probably should not cost much for people who subscribe to Bird News Extra already.

Andrew,

WAP provision can cost little or nothing in itself - most site hosts these days provide WAP server functionality as a matter of course (even the £14 pa "Value Host" I use from Supanames comes with WAP) - it's simply down to the site owner to get to grips with learning another language (WML) and creating the site.

There are even sites which will allow anyone to create a WAP site.

Birdguides' offering is a lot more sophisticated than that though!

Bird News Anywhere

In case anyone wasn't aware, the experimental free trial of Bird News Anywhere is now over and the Bird News Anywhere service is now available on subscription. Anyone who hasn't already tried it can have a free trial lasting one week via http://www.birdguides.com/anywhere/setup

One year's subscription costs £45, a month's subscription costs £10.

These subscription costs exclude network charges (discussed elsewhere in this thread). Various discounted combinations with other BirdGuides services are available, as listed at http://www.birdguides.com/subscribe

We're still considering a "pay as you go" version of the service, but this is not yet available.

More on Bird News Anywhere at http://www.birdguides.com/anywhere

Cheers
Dave Dunford

DaveD said:

...One year's subscription costs £45, a month's subscription costs £10.

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A quick update on prices for Bird News Anywhere:

The price for a year's Bird News Anywhere is now £50 (the £45 originally quoted was an introductory offer). A month's access is still £10.

Pay-as-you-go options are available at £3 for 24 hours or £1 for 15 minutes, both charged via your mobile bill.

All prices exclude connection charges. See http://www.birdguides.com/anywhere for more information.

Cheers
Dave Dunford