Not all that quickly though

Maths-phobes look away now.

Something about James' post struck me as a little odd. Not anything James said, but the quote from Voda: "Currently, you’re charged £2.35 for each MB. But from June 1st 2007, you’ll only pay £1 for up to 15MB per day. That’s 30 times more pages for the same price."

Huh? How does that work out? If 1Mb equals £2.35 before the change, and 15mb equals £1 now then actually you get 35 times as much data per pound! (35.25 to be precise).

No wonder it's taking the mobile operators so long to figure out that flat, or at least predictable, data tariffs are what we want. They can't even work out the basic maths in their pricing models.

Incidentally, that comparison above is only valid for the 15Mb you get for a pound. Stray over the 15Mb and Voda will charge you £2 a megabyte. For £2.35 you get 15.675 megabytes. Put another way that means you only get 15.675 times as much data for the same price as before not 30 times.

The thirty times statement comes from the proposition that you are paying for the first 0.5Mb of use per day and the other 14.5Mb are free. This is what's know in the trade as a bit of a strange 'un, rather like buying a chassis and getting the rest of the car for free. You can't buy a smaller bundle than the 15Mb offer, so the actual price of the thing is a pound for 15 megs however it's presented.