There have been a lot of bashings recently with the regard to mobile broadband operators using the word “Unlimited”

Ars Technica reported yesterday that Verizon, an American EV-DO provider have been ordered by the New York state to pay the sum of $1,000,000 dollars to 130,000 customers that used too much ‘unlimited’ data over the Verizon network, they were also slapped with a $150,000 fine.

The only real unlimited operator we have here in the UK is T-Mobile, the way they cap the downloads of their customers is by using a ‘fair usage’ policy which restricts you to 1GB per month. Its a fairly reasonable limit and far better than Vodafones 120Mb and Oranges 30Mb data offerings. Well this changed recently when O2 became the only operator in the UK to offer the iPhone, it must of course be accompanied by an O2 £35 – £55 pounds tariff which includes ‘unlimited’ data.

Now when O2 say unlimited they actually mean 1400 web pages per day at an average of 4-5kb per page, this equates to a truly aweful 200Mb per month. Now take a look at  O2′s own homepage which is over 33kbs, the BBC site over 22Kb and that’s without images or fancy flash animations. How many websites that you know of are only 4-5kbs?

These sorts of limits imposed by the mobile operators only hinder the up take of internet ready mobiles, PDA’s and other handhelds because the mass market fear being landed with a huge bill at the end of the month. Its just another example of progress being slowed by greed, a shame really.