XL Axiata on Wednesday revealed that the company will be launching a no-cost data package in December. No-cost as in free. The company, which is known for its willingness to experiment with various business models, is looking to boost the number of data subscribers and is counting on the free data plans to get more people online. The catch? Surprise, surprise, it’s advertising.

Delivering free or low cost products or services on the back of advertising money is obviously not a new approach. Companies of all kinds have employed this strategy with different levels of success and it’s not something that consumers are entirely opposed to. After all, companies like Twitter, Facebook, and Google are able to deliver free services thanks in part to advertising revenue, not to mention print media and radio and television broadcasts have been supported by advertising for decades. However, this strategy is not a common one for mobile carriers to implement. Typically, mobile subscribers pay a little to get a lot, at least these days anyway.

XL’s head of mobile advertising digital services Herwinto Chandra Sutantyo revealed the plans during a private discussion on mobile advertising practices. “Next month we will be introducing a data package that consumers will be free to use as much as they like, unlimited. But be prepared to see advertising, lots of it”.

For a lot of consumers the price of free is unbeatable, but whether they will tolerate the barrage of display advertising that will effectively pay for this scheme remains to be seen. Sutantyo did not elaborate how much or what kinds of advertising will be shown to those who choose to sign up to the free data package, but he repeated that “there will be a lot of ads”.

Currently XL has a number of data packages with different conditions and costs but the company introduces refinements or changes every so often. Many of the current terms will expire at the end of the year which means that when the company rolls out its free data plan, it may also introduce new terms for the paid plans.

It seems clear that the introduction of the free plan is a ploy to get customers to sign up to one of the paid plans as there has to be a limit to how much advertising a person can tolerate when going online. Sutantyo did not say whether the paid plans will be ad-free –he hinted that the cheaper plans may still deliver ads– but he did say that there is a way to opt out of XL-delivered display advertising by dialing 817 from an XL number.

At this point though, there’s no certain way to determine whether this apparent upsell strategy will work and if so to what extent as not only has the company yet to provide details of the free data plan but the new paid plans haven’t been disclosed either.

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