T-Mobile First Mobile Provider to offer Caller ID
It’s a big day in the mobile phone industry: T-Mobile is the first mobile phone provider to offer caller ID to their customers. Now presenting: Name ID.
For just $3.99 a month, Name ID gives you the name of the person who is calling - just like caller ID with a landline phone.
Before Name ID, cell phone users only saw the phone number that was calling them and, on some phones, the city and state the number is based out of. With Name ID, mobile users can now see the name of who’s calling them, just as they would on a traditional landline or VoIP line.
This is a first for the cellular industry and will only be offered on select phones from T-Mobile, including the Samsung Exhibit, but T-Mobile expects to expand the feature to other devices later this month. It will also become a standard feature on all future phone.
A survey done back in 2008 by Forrester Research indicated that 96% of respondents screened their phone calls and 59% wanted caller ID available on their mobile phone. Most were only willing to pay up to $4 a month for the feature.
T-Mobile seems to have nailed it with this one. Assuming the survey holds true in 2011, T-Mobile should be able to make some cool money off caller ID.
Providing caller ID on cell phone is very technically complex, though, and I wonder how much money T-Mobile will have to make for this to be a profitable success for the company.
Other wireless providers are sure to monitor the success of Name ID. Could we possibly see one of the other big 4 network providers offer the service in the coming year? We’ll have to wait and see.
I’ve got feelers out to T-mobile and Cequint, the company that helped T-Mobile develop Name ID, but so far, no calls have been returned.