Comments on: Mobile phones ‘bankrupting’ teens: How can we avoid breaking the bank? http://blog.taptu.com/2007/11/07/mobile-phones-bankruptcy/ Taptu makes it faster to find and share mobile-friendly stuff. It's the free alternative search machine, tailor made for mobile phones. Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:03:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.5 hourly 1 By: Carnival of the Mobilists #99: Time to Give Thanks? « Ubiquitous Thoughts http://blog.taptu.com/2007/11/07/mobile-phones-bankruptcy/comment-page-1/#comment-1420 Carnival of the Mobilists #99: Time to Give Thanks? « Ubiquitous Thoughts Mon, 12 Nov 2007 06:11:19 +0000 http://www.taptu.com/blog/2007/11/07/mobile-phones-bankruptcy/#comment-1420 [...] Vero Pepperrell at Taptology wrote a thought-provoking post about how Mobile phones are ‘bankrupting’ teens: How can we avoid breaking the bank? She points to ”a report by The Age which claims that Australian youngsters are having to [...] [...] Vero Pepperrell at Taptology wrote a thought-provoking post about how Mobile phones are ‘bankrupting’ teens: How can we avoid breaking the bank? She points to ”a report by The Age which claims that Australian youngsters are having to [...]

]]> By: Paul http://blog.taptu.com/2007/11/07/mobile-phones-bankruptcy/comment-page-1/#comment-1293 Paul Thu, 08 Nov 2007 10:52:10 +0000 http://www.taptu.com/blog/2007/11/07/mobile-phones-bankruptcy/#comment-1293 I'm a long-time VirginMobile customer, and have stayed with them because I think they're the only one who still give free voice mail (people pay to call leave a message, so the operators are greedy for charging to pick up messages). The one reason I am considering leaving VM is because of their horrendous GPRS data charges. I can only assume they're so bad because when VM originally signed their agreement to buy connectivity from T-Mobile that they didn't negotiate a reasonable rate for data. As a result, I only ever use mobile data in an emergency. Compare GPRS with my ADSL home broadband - about 1600 megabytes per pound (35GB included, charges are reasonable for excess). In contrast VirginMobile only give me approx. 0.2MB per pound (0.5p/kb), making it 8000 times (yes, that's right, eight thousand times) more expensive to use my mobile phone than broadband. This is why I bought an E65 which has wifi so I can download S60 applications etc cheaply, and also why I set up my home firewall with a bluetooth adaptor so that I can download traffic congestion data to my TomTom gps sat nav over broadband rather than running up my mobile phone bill. I’m a long-time VirginMobile customer, and have stayed with them because I think they’re the only one who still give free voice mail (people pay to call leave a message, so the operators are greedy for charging to pick up messages).

The one reason I am considering leaving VM is because of their horrendous GPRS data charges. I can only assume they’re so bad because when VM originally signed their agreement to buy connectivity from T-Mobile that they didn’t negotiate a reasonable rate for data. As a result, I only ever use mobile data in an emergency.

Compare GPRS with my ADSL home broadband – about 1600 megabytes per pound (35GB included, charges are reasonable for excess). In contrast VirginMobile only give me approx. 0.2MB per pound (0.5p/kb), making it 8000 times (yes, that’s right, eight thousand times) more expensive to use my mobile phone than broadband.

This is why I bought an E65 which has wifi so I can download S60 applications etc cheaply, and also why I set up my home firewall with a bluetooth adaptor so that I can download traffic congestion data to my TomTom gps sat nav over broadband rather than running up my mobile phone bill.

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