[adam917]

Originally Posted by Sophia

Well, what surprises me more than anything, is how native providers can all offer cheap(ish) plans. For example in the Netherlands you pay about €7 to €15 per month for unlimited Internet, on top of the voice plan. In Canada there is no such luck, the cheapest (and so far, only, also not nation wide yet) unlimited plan is WindMobile with $35/m on top of the voice plan.

However, as soon as roaming begins, you start paying through the nose, as Snidely's quote above shows. With WiFi points growing, and with increasingly improved Edge/3G networks globally, you'd think there would be a breakthrough one day... as already happened with voice plans.

Data has always been treated as different, same as SMS (which is nothing but a tiny blob of data being sent, right? What an easy way to earn $0.10, or while roaming, $0.60 or more!).

Now, with Google Voice popping up, and Skype providing voice over 3G, I wish there was a global provider who saw a market and offered a global data plan - at a USABLE rate

Now I'll descend from my soap box

It's not even a tiny blob of data but a part of the control channel like what tells your phone a call is coming in or that you have a new voice-mail! I think SMS was originally made for the engineers of the GSM networks, hence the short length of 160 characters/bytes (limit is due to the size of the control channel).