The problem is even worse actually, $100 – $150 a month will not get you an *adequate* amount of data.

The problem is that most of the fellows like the one that wrote that article don’t pay for their phones. Their corporation does, or at worst they can expense the costs.

On the other hand, you have me with his massive $28k per year gross income. I spent a couple of weeks on the road and all together spent about $30 for internet access that wasn’t included in the cost of the hotel etc. Conservatively I would say I uploaded about 40MB of pictures and downloaded 10 times that.

I also had a cell phone bill $30 higher than usual. $10 of that was long distance fees. The other $20 was for 400 KB of data when I wanted to check weather and schedules and had no i-net access.

Now, if I had a plan … well if I had a plan I would have to spend $50 a month, every month to get a whopping 10MB of data allowance. $600 a year. That is what it would cost me to have unlimited high speed access at the most expensive hotel rate.

I *would* use my phone gadgets and use it for tethering *if* I could buy it when I needed it, and at a reasonable rate.

The cell phone companies have gotten themselves into the same marketing paradigm as the airlines with “business class” – chasing after the few high end consumers that don’t pay directly our of pocket and finding that they aren’t making that much money when advertising, loyalty rewards and discounts are factored in. So they up the prices to the economy class while squeezing them into tighter and tighter spaces.

They need to adopt the “low cost” airline model like westjet everyone pays one reasonable rate, and they open up entirely new markets. One thing I discovered down in the maritimes was a common theme of travel between western Canada and the maritimes by people like myself that couldn’t afford to make the trip in either direction before westjet expanded it’s network. As little as 10 years ago it would have cost close to $2000 one way. Now it’s an $800 round trip. And every seat on every plane was full.

Data is also a low margin / high volume business, and sooner or later the phone companies will have to face that reality.