Over The Air Full Music Downloads Convenient...For Network Operators!

The Mirror.co.uk has a short piece on why network operators believe over the air full music downloads are convenient and highly profitable for them. According to the article, some "mobile phone users are being charged as much as £60 to download a single song on to handsets,with pay-as-you go customers suffering the most "with Vodafone charging £7.50 a megabyte of data and T-Mobile £20. That works out at £22.50 and £60 respectively for a three megabyte song."

Ben Wood at Gartner said, "People are getting bitten by the high charges. They discover these services then get a dreadful shock. They may only have surfed on a few sites and downloaded a few items but their mobile phone bill will have doubled."

That must be a fun bill to receive. Get the latest song for your handset for $2 and then get charged an extra $20 or more for the data usage! Unless you're on an all-you-can-eat data plan, OTA music downloads make completely no sense. And even if you are, is getting a song anytime, anywhere really that important that you can't wait to get back home and download it to the PC for at least half the price (in the U.S. that is)? You might as well go to the neareest store and purchase the CD at those prices...