Well, that didn’t take long! Mobile broadband sticks have only been on sale for a short while, and have only really taken off in the last few months, and already it is possible to get cash back on them!
Dialaphone, Mobiles.co.uk (carphone warehouse) and Mobile Express are already fighting it out with their instant cashback mobile broadband deals!
Currently the level of cashback on offer is pretty small, between £30 and £60, but that amount is only going to go one way!
As with all forms of cashback, these incentives are a way for retailers to compete on sales of similar products. They cannot reduce the montly rental you pay to the provider. They cannot reduce the initial amount you pay to the provider. Instead, they hand back a portion of their commission, so it works something like this:
Again, this is simply a mechanism for retailers to compete amongst themselves on a product they have no control over (in terms of price).
I do not expect these deals to ever extend to the point free rental deals have on mobile phones, simply due to the fact that there is little difference in value between the modems. With a mobile, there is a huge price differential between high end and budget phones. Free rental deals take advantage of this, offering budget handsets + cash back on high cost tariffs, as opposed to giving away a free high end handset. That situation simply does not exist with the broadband modems, they are all pretty well the same… so it is likely the cashback amounts will remain relatively small.
Subscribe to RSS