On the price of mobile bandwidth

So someone in the US went wild on his 3G connection and racked a huge bill without realising what he was doing.

What I find amazing is that the American public don't expect to have to pay for bandwidth.

I live in Europe (Belgium) and these potential surcharges on mobile broadband are indeed the norm here. Actually, getting a 5 GB cap on mobile broadband is extremely generous by European standards. To give you an idea by my provider offers 3 plans: the entry level data plan offers 10 MB (yes MEGAbytes) per month for like 7$, the medium data plan offers 200 MBs (again MEGAbytes) for around $12, and the top end plan offers 2 full GBs and cost around $30. This cost is in addition of your voice plan.

For the first 2 plans (10 Mb & 200 Mb month) any traffic beyond the quota is charger $3 per MB (again, yes $3 per MEGAbyte of data). People on the 2 GB plan that go beyond the allocated bandwidth only pay $0.12 per MB).
So if you have one of the small plans and you download 1 GB of data you can easily get a bill in the thousand of $.
This has always been like that and is the reason why very few people use mobile data for anything beyond checking mail and light surfing. Even on the big plan people know that applications like web radio and Youtube should be used in moderation if at all.

This price and usage difference between mobile internet and real broadband is something of which everybody is aware because this is VERY clearly stated in the pricing structure. Operators have realised that if someone isn't aware of this and go mad whit his mobile internet, they tend to refuse to pay the big bill that comes afterward. An operator that puts these things in the fine print is just stupid.