Wireless services add more parental controls

Suzanne Choney • E-mail

Pencils? Check. Notebooks? Check. Cell phone? Checkbook.

Nearly three-quarters of 13- to 17-year-olds in the United States have cell phones, according to the Yankee Group, and “tweens,” children between ages 8 and 12, are the next age range that wireless companies hope will carry a mobile in their back-to-school backpacks.

To help make the idea more appealing to parents, more carriers are offering them the tools to keep a tighter rein on their children’s cell phone use, from limiting the amount of texting their children can do, to setting the hours of when the phone can be used.

“Parental controls are getting robust now,” said Anne Collier, a mom who is co-director of ConnectSafely.org, and editor of NetFamilyNews.org.

AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile, for example, “offer the ability to have parents turn off text messaging, or block specific numbers, time and days, or phone-based purchases,” she said.

Verizon Wireless is expected to start offering the same kind of services in the weeks ahead.

The three carriers, along with Sprint and Alltel, already provide a free service to parents who want to limit their children’s access from phones to certain mobile Web sites. The companies also offer add-on GPS locator programs at a cost of up to $10 a month.

“Family-oriented services are garnering a huge interest in the wireless industry today, as carriers are looking to tap the capacity of this potential gold mine,” said analyst Deepa Karthikeyan, in a recent report for Current Analysis.

Jill Aldort, senior analyst of consumer mobility applications at the Yankee Group, said parental controls and monthly “family plans” are key to carriers gaining new subscribers.

“There’s not an incredible lot of growth left in the teen market — 13- to 17-year-olds — because the overall wireless market in the U.S. has been slowing down during the past few years,” she said.

“So, there has been a lot of focus on targeting teens through the family plans that carriers offer. Verizon and AT&T, in particular, have very strong market share with their family plans. It’s basically a bucket of minutes that can be shared across all of the members of your family for an add-on cost of $10 for each line. It has been an incredibly successful way to target the teen market, so much so, that 85 percent of teens are on family plans.”

In the 8- to 12-year-old “tween” market in the U.S., about 41 percent have cell phones, with the majority “heavily weighted toward 11- to 12-year olds,” Aldort said.

“There’s still several opportunities for growth there,” she said. “What becomes a bit more of a struggle with the tween market is that obviously, the tweens aren’t going to buy the cell phones themselves. The decision-making process is virtually 100 percent in their parents’ hands, so it’s a matter of do parents think their child needs a cell phone?

“The other question beyond that is, parents have a fear of overage charges, and ask, ‘If I get my child a cell phone, is my cell phone bill going to be $500 a month?’ ”

There’s good reason to be concerned. Time spent talking on the phone is an issue, but so is texting, the “glue of teens’ social circles,” said Aldort.

In the United States in 2007, there were 363 billion text messages sent, more than four times the 81 billion text messages sent in 2005, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry group.

Meanwhile, total minutes of cell phone use increased, but on a lesser scale, going from 1.5 trillion minutes in 2005 to 2.1 trillion in 2007.