Ouch. My first bill since having a 3G phone comes in. It is a horrendous £157.44p.
It's split into calls made while abroad, picture messaging and enhanced WAP.
Picture messaging is insignificant at 30 p a throw.
The calls made while abroad section is a big surprise because I used Skype for calls back home.
What I didn't account for was the fact that a local call made to someone inside the country I was in would be charged so heavily.
For instance £15 for a 12 minute local call in China, and £3.90 for a three minute locall call.
Where I was really stiffed was in the enhanced WAP section of the bill. There's an innocent little button on the side of my Sony Ericsson which should be labelled 'Money Drain'.
Push it and you're on the Internet.
On the first night of my first trip abroad with this phone, I pushed the money drain button after a Schweinehaxe and a couple of Pils, and ran up £25 for accessing BBC News. I looked at five items. That's 5Meg of data, at a fiver a megabyte..
Checking this blog site from Germany cost £6 for accessing 1.2Mbyte of data. The cost seems to be the same if you access sites from abroad or from home. From the UK it cost £7.58 to access 1.5Mbytes, and £11.5 for accessing 2.4Mbyte.
The operators have bitten me once. But they won't again. Like the hotels which charge unbelievable sums for making phone calls, you soon learn to avoid them and find other ways to make your calls.
Thank God for public access WiFi and Skype.
The sooner WiFi and Skype rid us of these grasping, greedy, gouging cellular guys, the better.
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