Hapless man charged $1800

It's a heart-breaking story, and one that that could happen to any of us.

Last week, Paul Brislen (pictured) was in Australia, on work business.

He arrived on Tuesday. By Friday, his mobile phone had been cut off.

Why?

Because he'd blown through his credit limit, spending $1800 in around 72 hours.

He wan't doing anything fancy. "I carried on using my phone here in the way I do at home. Email, voice, txt, twitter. The odd website but not too much because it's been a busy few days," Mr Brislen blogged on Friday.

Keen readers will detect a hint of irony here.

For until recently, Mr Brislen was chief spin doctor for Vodafone New Zealand, which, along with Telecom and 2degrees, saddles its customers with sky-high roaming rates (the chief argument the telcos use: New Zealand is smaller, with less bargaining power).

Now, as a civilian, working for Tuanz, Mr Brislen has felt the full impact of ridiculous pricing.

Anyhow, at the TelCon11 conference in Auckland today, I asked Steven Joyce how the joint Australian-New Zealand government investigation was going.

Few, beyond the mentally ill, would argue with the minister's observations that transtasman roaming rates are ridiculously expensive, and that phone companies often don't do enough to publicise them, or explain them in words that your average traveller will understand.

Yet it's almost a full year ago that Mr Joyce first announced the investgation into "bill shock".

What's happening?

The MED, and its counterpart across the Tasman, are now close to concluding their investigations, and are now comparing notes.

Mr Joyce said he expected to discuss romaing when he meant with his opposite number, Senator Stephen Conroy, in Hobart at this month for the Kanz (Korea, Australia, NZ) broadband summit.

So, don't hold your breath, but hopefully you won't be charged between $5 and $30 a megabyte ($30,000 a gigabye) for much longer. Nor will you have to buy a local SIM card (great, expect you lose a little thing called your usual phone number) or faff aroud with mobile VoIP. As Mr Brislen noted, his mobile at home is charged at $1/10MB or 1c/MB.

And once that deal is sealed, how about a nosey at Air New Zealand's joke in-flight broadband pricing? (Which runs to an off-the planet $40 per megabyte.)