Why do mobile tariffs always seem to be overly complicated? With the recent July 1st EU charges cap there was a chance to make the cost of using data services abroad nice and simple. So how did the operators do? Let’s take two examples.

First, Vodafone. They announced a cut in roaming charges across the EU to £4.99 a day for up to 25MB. That works out, as the press release helpfully says, at the equivalent of 20p per MB. But wait, in true operator fashion there’s a little bit of a complicated twist.

That £4.99 a day deal is just for mobile data. Under 1MB Vodafone will charge you a per KB rate, with 100KB costing 50p. Go above a meg and you’ll instantly be charged £4.99 for the remaining 24MB. What happens after 25MB? You get charged another £4.99, and get another 25MB. And so on and so forth.

If you’re planning to use your mobile broadband dongle, that price doubles – but so does the inclusive data bundle. Whether the per KB charging for dongle usage remains is a little unclear, but you’ll be charged £9.99 for 50MB chunks of data. Again, this is all on a daily basis – so if you use 2MB of data every day for a week on your laptop it’ll end up costing a rather hefty £69.93.

If you venture outside of the Europe (Vodafone have defined all of Europe – whether it’s in the EU or not – as ‘zone 1′), it’s £14.99 per day per 25MB on your phone, or £29.99 per day per 50MB on your dongle.

At this point, I’d imagine even the more maths-savvy consumer is a bit lost in figures. Why can’t things just be simple – one price for data per megabyte whether it be on your laptop or mobile?

Cue 3 and their new charges. £1.25 per MB – no minimums, no bundles, no 24 hour windows and no differentiation between your phone or a dongle. A pricing model so simple that it takes one sentence to explain, versus four paragraphs. OK so it may be more expensive per megabyte if you’re a heavy user, but at least you don’t need a calculator and a calendar to work it all out.

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