Steve Litchfield

The modern world is just ridiculous sometimes. Looking at my latest phone bill from BT, I see they're now charging an extra 'Payment fee' for the privilege of paying them!! Sure, businesses have admin costs, but aren't these suppose to be built into the price you agreed to pay for the service in the first place? If it wasn't for the 12 month contract I signed with UK Online for Internet access, I'd ditch my BT line right now, out of protest. It's a LOT cheaper to go for a combined Internet/phone deal with any number of cable suppliers - and that's exactly what I'm going to do in 2009.

No, I really am. As you know, many of the European network operators slashed their prices for data on the 1st June, some in more ways than others, but I hadn't really had a chance to test them in real life. Now, I'm on Vodafone pay-as-you-talk, famed for its previously exorbitant data rates of £7.30/MB - yes, you read that right. So I basically only ever grabbed tiny email messages and restricted myself to the mobile Web. But, come a few spare minutes, I thought I'd experiment and put the new tariff (£1 cap per day, £2/MB, up to 15MB) to the test. Hammering the Web and some downloads, I slammed 10MB through my Nokia N95 in about 20 minutes. Checking my credit afterwards, it had indeed gone down by only £1. I'm impressed. Let's take stock for a moment. That's £1 for 15MB, effectively, on a single day, or around 7 pence per Megabyte, compared to £7.30/MB, a hundredfold decrease in charges. In fact, impressed is something of an understatement. Finally, finally, th...