data charges in italy

[donpedro]

Hi,

I am posting on this forum in the hope that someone here is an expert on Italian data plans and can help us out. I work for a company which has a mobile application (for S60, UIQ and WinMobile) that runs in the background and connects to the Internet (HTTP, not WAP) once per day. The app is currently available in the US and UK and we are planning to launch in Italy next.

The amount of data the application transfers is trivial. Normally 1-3KB per day. Which means that with most data plans the total data cost will be no more than €0,5-1 per month.

However, from investigation into data plans in Italy it seems that the operators there have a minimum charge per connection and/or day. In other countries the operators may have a minimum count of 1KB, but that is normally an insignificant cost. In Italy however, we’ve seen "set-up" charges of up to €0,60. Which increases the cost of running our application from €0,5-1 to €18 per month…

I would greatly appreciate feedback from this forum on whether or not my understanding of the Italian market is correct. Is this a real issue for everyone, or is it just specific operators or data plans?

Are there other data plans available that we could tell our users to subscribe to?

Any information would help. If the data costs in Italy are really this high we have no hopes of ever getting any users there.

Thanks in advance,

-don