So, curious why I had not yet received a cell phone bill, I looked up my account on the Cingular website. You will be unsurprised to hear that the one-month balance approached half a K, approximately $400 of which was in data charges associated with the Treo.
These charges are levied at 3 cents per kilobyte, or $30 per mb. Over the first 30 days of use, my data usage was about 14 mb, primarily in failed atempts to get AvantGo to sync.
Naturally, I renegotiated my service plan. I’m now on an unlimited data-usage plan.
Longtime readers will know in advance that while I’m pleased at my calm and methodical approach to getting a significant portion of the bill credited back in exchange for the upgrade, I loathe having been so smoothly pinballed into the entirely unreasonable total monthly service plan.
You heard it here first: after two years, no more cell phones for me. I’ve had and rejected them several times in the past, and see no compelling reason to expect that I will ever become reconciled to a one-hundred dollar monthly communication tax.
I’m pretty surprised at that 30MB (not the price, though). You must be doing some serious Treo surfing, on the most overpriced datacomms available.
I stay pretty close to the cellular/comms market, and there’s no sign that any of them are looking at more reasonable data pricing. $80 per month at Verizon and Sprint for unlimited data is crazy when there’s a Starbucks or Borders on every corner, and I can use my unlimited T-Mobile plan there for $30 per month.
Free WiFi, too, popping up all over the place, is going to kill that cellular data market if they don’t get right with pricing. Thought about Skype yet, for your interviews?