This month Vodafone in the U.K. announced it would offer flat-rate data plans to its subscribers. I have seen Vodafone’s director of new business development Frank Boulben speak a handful of times this spring, and he can’t stop talking about how the service will encourage mobile Web usage, and says it’s an industry breakthrough because the Vodafone price point beats some of the U.S. equivalent, so-called unlimited data plans.
We all have heard stories of U.S. carriers like Verizon throttling data usage once it reaches a certain point. Well Om Malik is reporting on GigaOm that the $15 per month charged as a flat rate by Vodafone only gets you 120 MB, and additional data usage costs $4 per megabyte. Let’s see how well-received this ground-breaking price structure is when U.K.-based subscribers get their bills in big, fat envelopes.