Consider for a moment the word unlimited; it’s an adjective and, if you’ll pardon the condescension, it means the following:
- not limited; unrestricted; unconfined
- boundless; infinite; vast
- without any qualification or exception; unconditional
Except in the world of mobile data or mobile broadband, where unlimited means, in a vaguely disturbing twisted, inverted, doublespeak sort of way, the exact opposite.
Vodafone, my current UK mobile provider, helpful tells me that I have unlimited data, subject to their fair use policy which promptly redefines unlimited as very much limited indeed and your limit is 5GB per month. That’s a lot of data. Even being the compulsive photo uploader, web browser, Foursquare and Gowalla check in, Twitter and Facebook poster and checker that I am, I’m hard pressed to go above 500MB per month let alone 5GB.
So I was both vastly amused and somewhat shocked when this text arrived on my iPhone on the way home from work last night.
A quick call to Vodafone luckily cleared this up as being a glitch in their billing systems and I would not, as stated be charged, nor had I gotten anywhere near the 5GB limit of unlimited.
I found the whole process rather amusing in hindsight but shouldn’t the mobile companies either come clean about what unlimited really means or just don’t sell unlimited data as a concept at all and just sell a, 5GB in my case, data limit?
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
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