Would you pay $30,000 per Gb for data?

Oct 6, 2008

I was chatting with a friend recently, who was complaining about the data costs he incurred while travelling to the USA on a 6 month trip.
He said it cost 30 cents per 10kb of data.

I gave this some thought and realised it equated to a whopping $30,000 per gigabyte. I can understand that Blackberry users would never need a whole gig of data, but it's easy to go through that if you use your phone as a modem like I do.

Might I recommend using extra caution before considering data roaming - 30 cents doesn't sound like a lot of money, until you realise how little you can do with 10kb of data. Vodafone do advise caution on their data roaming page, but they don't mention the cost in gigabytes, for obvious reasons.

My friend is employed by the Government, so I'm sure his complaints would have been louder if it was coming from his own pocket (thanks again taxpayer).