I pity the fool
Every time I read about the excesses of UK telco's I cringe with sympathy. Fortunately I live in Finland and I have a 384kbps unlimited data UMTS connection on my phone which costs me a grand total of 10 euros/month no matter how much I use it.
The funny thing is that the data connection only uses the free bandwidth of the base station that otherwise would be completely extraneous. If the base station gets congested during "rush hours" the data connections are the first to be throttled or cut altogether if it gets too bad. Then they dare to charge the customers like it was a premium service when in fact it is the exact opposite.
It's free money as far as the telco's are concerned, since they have already allocated the cost of the infrastructure to the regular call and SMS prices. In their projections they probably had an allowance for a certain amount of idling in the infrastructure which is also reflected in the call prices. Now that there is more traffic and less idling, they actually get more that they originally projected from the same investment. That should naturally be reflected in the prices like they do in Finland.
Since most of the telco's are also ISP's, the barely discernible increase in net traffic due to mobile internet is probably insignificant in their total net traffic, they really shouldn't be able to justify those prices in any shape or form. The public's ignorance is probably the only reason this kind of practice is allowed to go on.
It's quite amazing that 5 million people spread in a very sparsely populated country with long distances have prices MUCH lower than in a supposedly technologically advanced one.