The mobile data business is a world of deception

The harsh reality is that mobile data is a luxury that many users cannot afford

Honestly, I do try to avoid writing the same column twice, but it's harder than you think.

This is what happens: something comes up and it obviously calls for some kind of comment. So you ring the people involved, and try to find out what's going on, and then you write it down. And then, you think: "Darn, this is starting to sound familiar."

A quick search of the key words reveals the truth: it's the same column you wrote this time last year. So back to the drawing board for a fresh idea. But despite my best efforts to keep things fresh, one topic keeps hogging the limelight – mobile data.

Now, why is that? Well, every three or four months, I burst into fury about the lies told by mobile operators relating to mobile data. The facts are simple: if operators charged for sending data over the air at cost, the price would be unacceptable to the market. But if they charged what the market will bear, they would have to sell at a loss, or find "spare bits" at off-peak times, which isn't want we users want. When we want to download a popular tune, it's because we really want it now, and if we don't want it right now, we can wait till we get home and download it, free, onto the PC.
So why do I keep writing this story?

The answer is that it's a story that should have been exposed five years ago when I first wrote it. In those five years, people have systematically and persistently attempted to con us all into thinking that mobile data is a viable business. No matter how often the truth is written down, there's always some research firm selling "projected growth" in mobile data, or some operator claiming "vastly improved ARPU" (average revenue per user) for downloaders. Or it's a new "background download" system to find off-peak bandwidth cheap.

Last month, several Vodafone subscribers contacted me. They'd signed up to a 25MB-per-month data service for their 3G cards. They'd been billed for £600 pounds, at £4/MB. "If they [had] signed up for the 'unlimited' data," said Vodafone loftily, "they wouldn't have been billed at the commercial rate when they went beyond their contracted data volume."

Ah, so that's what the commercial rate is. They know it. Why does nobody admit it up front?