This post brought to you via Vodafone data

Thank you Vodafone. Thank you for the £2/day-for-25mb deal. It’s good enough to make posts like this possible. The photo I’ve attached here (snapped on-the-go from the taxi window) is 1.6mb. Sending this to the web would normally cost me £2-3 once you take into account the surrounding data overhead.

Thanks to Vodafone’s opt-in European data policy, I can use my BlackBerry without having to panic. I’m just billed a simple £2 each day. Manageable. Reasonable. I’m content.

If you travel often to Europe and you’re a Vodafone customer, phone up and check you’ve got this option added. You need to opt-in otherwise you’ll pay the quid-a-meg rates.

The big arse of course — there is an arse — is that once you go over 25mb per day, you start racking up the quid-a-meg rates.

This is because some bright spark at Vodafone thought it was a good idea to almost get it right. It’s like the company has a built-in screw-it-up register to guarantee no matter how smart and how exciting the original concept, some committee, somewhere, votes to hamstring it.

I’ve already opted-in, right? By doing this, I’ve told you I’m live to your stupid standard data rates. I’ve told you I care. I’ve made it clear I will pay — but not the crazy rates. Ergo, why not change the price to £2 for 25mb blocks? So if I use an arbitrary 42mb in a day, you’ll charge me £4.

Sounds like a good idea? No? Yeah. I know. Those executives and those committees don’t like it. They don’t like the ‘revenue limitation’. You can practically guarantee that at one of these price plan setting meetings, a chap called Colin with a company supplied Nokia 3310 has actually voiced the words, “25mb for £2! That should be enough for anybody going abroad!”

Keep ramming the Vodafone fist up the proverbial enterprise arse to extract silly roaming rates. Those guys have factored the roaming-arse-extraction into their 5-year budget forecasts.

But for everyone else? Why not do a bit of delighting? £2 for 25mb blocks? Go on.