€5 per MB if you go over Vodafone's data cap

That's the small print behind Vodafone's latest mobile internet offering, which is a €10 per month tariff for 500MB of data downloaded. I'm not hugely impressed by the data cap. The alternative is an up-front €1 for a one-day only 50MB of data, aimed at pre-paid users. I asked a Vodafone spokesman to justify the data cap policy. This was the response:

"If a customer exceeds the daily limit they are charged 0.5c per KB (or €5 per MB). However, to put the download limits into perspective, 50MB = 50,000KB or about 1000 adapted web page views. An average web page adapted for use on a mid-range mobile would use approx 75KB. Likewise, 50MB = 50,000KB or about 2,000 WAP pages. An average WAP page on your mobile would use approx 20KB."

Okay, but I've just come back from a Nokia conference where they launched an online music store aimed at downloading over the air. Given that one of their MP3 files is 3MB, once over Vodafone's O.5GB data cap it would cost €15 to download in data charges alone!