The O2 iPhone and the truth behind the "unlimited" free data

While The Cloud "free" Wi-Fi restrictions come light too

19 October 2007 13:09 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

When Steve Jobs and the Matthew Key, the CEO of O2, announced the iPhone in the UK, the tariffs the phone will be available on were described as offering unlimited data.

When quizzed on this point, it was revealed that this "unlimited" offer was in fact subject to a fair use policy, but we were assured this would allow for up to 1400 web pages a day to be viewed.

Skip forward a few weeks and it has been revealed by ZDNet that this "unlimited" offer boils down to just 200MB of data per month. Which means if you did want to look at 1400 pages a day they would have to be an unrealistic less than 5kb in size each.

In fact, this 200MB limit compares badly with other providers in the UK, such as T-Mobile. Their comparably priced (in fact, cheaper over all) unlimited data plan allows a fair use policy of up to 1GB a month, which is five times more than O2.

And - for those London-dwellers who think that they won't need the data via O2 as they can just use The Cloud's completely free Wi-Fi coverage that's bundled in with the iPhone?

MacWorld has had it confirmed from O2 that that is also restricted - to 60 hours a month.