It’s a fine thing this 3G. My new phone let’s me access http://news.bbc.co.uk from my foreign breakfast table, and it allows me to get my laptop on-line using the phone as a modem, when WiFi and Ethernet aren’t available. But God does it cost.
Over the least week emails have arrived from my network operator saying I’ve breached my credit limit. I send them more money. More emails arrive. I’ve spent at least fifty quid fiddling around on the Internet.
So I go and check out my account at the network operator and, it turns out that, every time I have accessed a web-page using my phone, it has cost me over a quid.
So, OK, if you’re going to take the Mick, Mr Network Operator, I won’t use your 3G service. That probably helps explain why only ten per cent of the UK wireless operators’ revenues come from 3G revenues seven years after 22 billion quid was spent on 3G licences.
I know greed runs in the veins of the operators, as the absurdly inflated roaming charges prove, but pricing a fledgling service so high is a sure recipe for strangling it.
Rather like killing the goose because it won’t lay more than one golden egg at a time.
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