International Travellers Hit With Heavy Fees On Their iPhones

If you travel internationally for business, and you have an iPhone, you can expect to be paying quite a bit for the right.

AT&T, the lone carrier of the popular phone in the United States, announced new plans this week for those users who travel internationally.  The new plans run $120 a month for 100 megabytes of international data use or $200 for 200 megabytes. AT&T sees this is a bargain as under the old plans, a 3-minute video on YouTube, approximately 2 mb, would have run a customer $40, so this should seem like a bargain to some. Mind you, these amounts are on top of your normal fees, so this could get quite expensive very quickly.

If you are only traveling for one month, there is another small hitch in that you can not pre-arrange a cut off date for the service, so you have to contact them as soon as you are done traveling so that they will turn off the service and stop charging you for it.  If you forget to inform them, or are a day late (they have said they won’t prorate), then you pay for another month.

This is one of those situations where it shows how lack of competition is a bad thing.  The locked in exclusivity to AT&T through 2010 keeps people such as myself away from it, no matter how much I desire having one of these devices.