Vodafone sent me (and 1000’s of others no doubt) a txt msg today announcing their new mobile internet plans. The big change is for casual users (probably anyone like me on prepay) who now have the following pricing,
$1/day for 10MB, no monthly fee, $1/MB overage
In other words, that’s ~$30/month for 300MB. While this is not a bad price in NZ’s (crippled) mobile data market, it is still complete pants compared to the rest of the world. It’s also worth noting that this a better deal than their “Broadband Starter” plan which is $30/month for 200MB on a 2 year contract. Go figure.
While on the topic of ridiculous pricing for mobile data, lets look at what those sms/txt messages cost you. At 20 cents per message that’s cheap right? Wrong! Time for some math…
1 sms = 160 7-bit characters (max) = 1,120 bits = 140 bytes
1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes (SI units) = 7142 sms messages
1 sms message costs 20 cents
Therefore, sending 1 MB via sms costs $1,428!
Of course if you don’t max out your 160 characters (or if you base it on 1024^2 bytes) it’s much more expensive. Wow.
Now if that doesn’t make you realise just how much money the telco’s are creaming off us, I don’t know what will.
As a Canadian mobile data user I feel your pain; moreover, I think the two biggest roadblocks to widespread take-up of the mobile internet are:
1. Non-unlimited data plans,
2. International data roaming charges.
Here’s hoping that changes sooner rather than later!
Cheers Andrew.
I’m just glad for you guys that Rogers actually appeared to listen to their customers in Canada and change their iPhone data pricing – no doubt influenced by this petition,
http://www.petitiononline.com/iPhone99/petition.html