Expensive travels (iPhone)
I have been travelling a bit since I got my iPhone, and got a nasty shock yesterday when the phone was barred by O2 for having reached a billing-level of £323 above my monthly subscription. Due to a bug in the O2 web portal this level of charges were not apparent to me.
After 3 sets of emails back & forth to their (outsourced) helpdesk that left me frustrated I called the O2 iPhone customer support line. A nice Northern englishman took me through the website navigation to the right page to show me how the charges had arisen. He then surprised me by gently offering to in this instance waive the data-roaming costs incurred; as this was my first bill using the iPhone. Magic!
The majority of the charges consisted of:
- £303.73 levied from a few days in Switzerland where I had used 51,835 KB of EDGE data, and
- £14.51 levied from an overnight visit to Amsterdam where I had used 2,477 KB of EDGE data.
The roaming abroad cost per MB is thus £6 (excl. VAT) = £7.05 (incl VAT).
I am at a loss to explain how I’ve used this much EDGE data reading & sending emails, but clearly it is exceptionally expensive to allow the iPhone to do EDGE data-roaming whilst abroad. A Wi-Fi passport with T-Mobile or someone like that could come in handy, but is less convenient than simply accessing your email on the train or walking about.
The O2 customer support told me they are working on a £10/month contract bolt-on to give iPhone users free data-roaming and incoming phone-calls across Europe (including Switzerland). This bolt-on is expected to launch in Jan/Feb ‘08 timeframe.
The alternative is to buy a Blackberry Curve on a data-only tariff as the compression applied by the RIM email gateway significantly reduces data requirements. This additionally gives me Instant Messaging. Downside is having to carry another device.