Wednesday, May 04, 2005
'Rip-off Britain' alive and well in the GPRS/3G Data world
Rumours of the demise of 'Rip-off' Britain are obviously untrue (For those of you outside the UK a quick aside , the UK used to be a famously cheap country, when I was growing up it was always New York, Paris and Tokyo that were the expensive cities; now people fly to New York to save money on their shopping! and the only thing still cheap in the UK is the weather. We typically pay in pounds whatever the dollar price is for something so if something is $200 it will be £200 which is worth nearly $400 , and our petrol is the world's dearest at nearly $8 , unbelievably some people are so desparate to come to britain and pay these prices that they will hide in lorries or hang on to trains)
- I've been looking at data prices for GPRS/3G cards from the main UK suppliers , most are still charging in excess of £1 per megabyte and many won't roll-over unused data (that you've paid for) from one month to the next - If you can commit to £70-80 a month then you can get 1000Mb a month , but even that wouldn't be much use if you wanted to download the new Beta of Visual Studio 2005 for example. Until you can treat a service as 'just there' like electricity it will never become pervasive outside narrow corporate markets.
- I've been looking at data prices for GPRS/3G cards from the main UK suppliers , most are still charging in excess of £1 per megabyte and many won't roll-over unused data (that you've paid for) from one month to the next - If you can commit to £70-80 a month then you can get 1000Mb a month , but even that wouldn't be much use if you wanted to download the new Beta of Visual Studio 2005 for example. Until you can treat a service as 'just there' like electricity it will never become pervasive outside narrow corporate markets.
