A very interesting thing happened yesterday (1st of July, 2010) – Slovenia’s leading mobile operator, Mobitel, announced (no English news available) that they will be cutting down the amount of data traffic available in its subscription packages. They have been offering packages including 1GB of data traffic for more than 12 months and got many new subscribers on board during this period.

Yesterday, Mobitel decided to cut down the amount to 100MB, 900MB less. Users revolted, filling Mobitel’s Facebook page with angry comments in addition to a huge amount of posts on Twitter.

It is quite clear why Mobitel had to do this – their network was hardly keeping up with the heavy usage induced by almost flat fee pricing as 1GB per user is a lot in mobile. Some users with unlimited, flat fee packages commented that they transfer almost 70GB of content in a normal month, combining mobile surfing and tethering, mainly using YouTube, Flickr, MySpace and other web applications.

From my point of view this shows us an interesting insight – apparently many, many common users (not early adopters/geeks/nerds) care about their online mobile services and that they regard mobile web/data access as something really important, as important as calls or SMSes.

This is quite exciting for those of us who are trying to be active in the mobile space, meaning that we can hope the mobile web will become as ubiquitous as the “attached to a wall” internet is, not only from the technology perspective, but also from the user’s perspective, thus forcing operators to adapt and provide an even better service.