About
El Blog!, Touppi's Super Eleet Blog.
Tuomas Toivonen
Subscribe
Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog,
brought to you by the wonders of RSS.
Flavours
There's more than one way to view this weblog; try these flavours on
for size.
Links
These are a few of my favourite links.
Thu, 19 Oct 2006
Surfing for swell forecasts (at 5,99 €/MB)
Duh, yeah, surfing is expensive, but I thought it mostly had to do with the transportation (300 km of driving one way between Helsinki and Pori) and with the time invested (lost productivity). Earlier today Sonera was king enough drop me an sms and inform that my next mobile phone bill would be in the order of 180 euros. Like, I mean, wtf?
Apparently I am being charged for - well - surfing. The past week I'd done two trips to Pori and having stayed in Raisio I'd been forced to bear with the wonders of the mobile Internet for my swell forecasts. Setting up the network connection via Bluetooth between my Powerbook and Nokia had been relatively painless. I was a bit mystified though that things just worked. I didn't recall ever ordering any GPRS package with my subscription. But no matter, it worked and since none of my mobile-IRC addicted friends had complained of excessive costs, I was more or less satisfied.
As it turns out, my subscription has had a basic data service by default. Fine except that traffic is charged at a completely ridiculous 5,99 euros per MB. Having surfed for swell forecasts (and some IRC, a bit of news.bbc.co.uk) for some 25 MB, the data transfer bill stands at 150,18 euros.
Sucks, but oh well, doesn't really compare with the first bill from Sonera after a couple of weeks in Damascus. At well over a thousand euros that's a clear record. That was covered by the company, but swell forecast surfing, that's on me.
P.S. No, I am not writing this over GPRS, but rather at the city library of Raisio where they have excellent WLAN, at no cost.