We are planning to go on holiday next month to France. Which is nice. I am also planning to take my phone now that the mobile internet is exploding. Which is also nice. The trouble is that I am actually planning to use my phone in order to access the web (email, Twitter, Flickr etc), and that's where the problems start. I have been ranting about excessive data charges abroad for years so I was interested to see how things had changed now that "unlimited" data packages are widely available in the UK.
The man in the T-Mobile shop said they charged £1.50 a megabyte in data charges for mobile phones accessing the internet in France. To give some idea of what that means, I recently uploaded a three-minute video to YouTube, which was over 80MB. For nothing. If I had done that on T-Mobile's tariff, it would have cost me £120. A single song these day could be 10MB, which would cost £15 to download.
I decided to ring my current provider, O2, to get a comparison. An extremely helpful assistant quoted me £3 a megabyte for France – twice the rate of T-Mobile, which was starting to look cheap. She pointed out that "bolt-ons" to my existing tariff were available offering a package of 10MB for £20 or 50MB for £50. A bit better, but still crap.
My final port of call was Vodafone, which used to be my operator of choice until they tried to charge me £250 for the privilege of staying loyal to them when I upgraded my phone. I wondered whether they had changed their spots. The man in the shop quoted me £4.25 a megabyte – which would have pushed the cost of uploading that video to £340 and a single track to £42.50, with no special bolt-ons to bring down the price.
So what is going on here? This is not something happening in a computer game, it is the real world. Unsuspecting people going abroad regularly get milked by those extortionate charges. And savvy people get caught as well. I know someone in the business who checked before he left for eastern Europe that he was not going to be exposed to these charges only to find out he had run up a £600 bill the first morning.
It is happening because the operators have treated their customers with scarcely concealed contempt for years. Not only did they build walled gardens around their phones, thereby shutting out rival products but they also paid content providers a pittance to create games and other stuff for their sites. This was not only bad manners but bad business. If they had paid content providers decent prices and had cheaper data charges they could have built up a market for apps years before Apple came on to the scene. But it took Apple to break their monopoly by popularising "all you can eat" data charges and letting developers keep 70% of the income (before VAT).
But where is the white knight who will ride to the rescue over data charges abroad? The European commission has done much to improve roaming charges, but hasn't so far made much impact on data. It would be called daylight robbery except that it goes on through the night as well. It is not even in the interests of business because if international charges were capped it would lead to an explosion of data traffic, which would more than make up for the willful exploitation of their so-called customers.
There is an alternative – to use free Wi-Fi hotspots – but not everyone has access to them. The other possibility is that I may have missed something and there is actually a sensible argument for high data charges. Is there anyone out there from the operators who would care to put the argument for the defence? If not, then they should immediately put a stop to this outrageous scandal.