Why Skinny’s $200 4G modem isn’t as costly as it looks

Tim Hughes commented on Skinny 4G broadband service at Geekzone. He suggests $200 is a lot of money to pay upfront for a fixed wireless broadband modem.

Maybe.

Skinny's 4G fixed wireless broadband service costs $55 a month for a plan with 60GB of data. The Skinny web site makes it clear the official modem is not optional.

If you stick with Skinny for a year, the $200 cost of the modem adds up to an extra $16 a month. Over two years it would be $8 a month.

If the Skinny 4G service suits your needs, the extra cost of the wireless broadband modem makes sense.

Upfront cost buys flexibility

By making customers buy the modem first, Skinny can offer 4G broadband without restrictive contracts. That flexibility makes the deal more attractive to some users.

Buying the $200 modem outright would be better than committing to a 12 or 24-month contract. But that is not an option.

That said, you could pick up the same hardware for far less if you could purchase it directly. It’s unlikely Skinny pays much more than $50 a unit wholesale for the Huawei wireless modems.

To put the price in perspective, I recently saw an invoice for a 33 Kbps modem I bought 20 years ago when working as a magazine editor in Sydney. It was A$700. That’s well over NZ$1000 in today’s money and yet we considered that money well spent.