Living in the UK, I find what I’ve seen of the US system, such as it is, to be totally bizarre. I saw fees of $.03 per kilobyte of data on a US mobile phone website the other day. That’s $30 per megabyte - completely insane. One cat gif could cost $100. My carrier’s cheapest pay-as-you-go plan charges 20p for the first 20mb and 20p for each further mb each day and I find that to be very overpriced, since for 60 of those 20ps (£12) I can get unlimited data for 30 days, and a bunch of minutes and unlimited texts to boot.
Incidentally the unlimited data packages are quite new and somewhat controversial and there’s a lot of misleading marketing out there as to what exactly constitutes “unlimited”. The typically toothless regulators (the ASA, Ofcom and Oftel) have dithered about it but there’s no gold standard definition. Some include tethering, some don’t; some have restrictve “fair use policies” that essentially say “if you go over 30gb downloaded in one month, your connection will be slowed to a crawl” despite the service being marketed as “unlimited”. But the plans do exist, they are cheap, and it’s excellent.
Which isn’t to say that the phone companies don’t still skank you on contract deals, but it seems like we’re getting a much better deal than you even when we’re getting screwed!
