The cost of mobile data access is one of the factors preventing greater take-up of this kind of wireless service, according to recent stories in the press. But it can’t just be that users are reluctant to pay the prices operators are charging. In my experience, it can often be next to impossible to track exactly how much data traffic you are racking up until the bill arrives, and this is probably as much of a factor as anything else.

Tariffs for mobile data are generally structured around a monthly fee that allows users to send and receive data up to a certain limit. Step beyond this limit, however, and users face a steep rise in charges – as much as £4 per extra megabyte of traffic in some cases.

The problem is that applications still largely assume that the endpoint is a PC connected to a high-speed network where the volume of throughput is not an issue. This can be seen with web pages, which can easily be 100kB in size, and if you click any link to a following page, that’s another 100kB you’ve downloaded.

When you consider this, it is easy to see how mobile users can quickly burn up their monthly traffic allowance and end up costing their companies a fortune in additional data fees. What can be done to address it? Well, laptops that have built-in 3G broadband connectivity often come with an application to manage wireless connections, and these can provide information on data traffic.

One such model currently in the IT Week Labs is the Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook 7230. This generally only shows the amount of data you have sent and received for the current session, but with a little delving I found a screen showing the history of the total volume of data that has come in and gone out. This isn’t perfect, but it can give you at least some idea of the amount of data you are sending and receiving.

Then again, 3G data connectivity is costly, especially compared with Wi-Fi hotspots that offer higher data transfer speeds. Of course, you have to be relatively close to a Wi-Fi hotspot in order to get a connection, so the wide area network carriers ought to have a key advantage here. Sadly, high-speed 3G network coverage still appears to be patchy outside the big cities.

The carriers seem to be in a chicken and egg situation here. They need to increase take-up of 3G in order to recoup the money they have already invested in the technology, yet roaming users will ask why they should pay extra for 3G broadband if there is no guarantee the extra bandwidth will be available when it is needed.