[jbooth]

A priceless stradivarious is a totally different ballgame than a very easily priced amount of gigabytes of 3G transfer. Some sense of market prices for what she actually used should have weighed in here, but obviously it didn't.

[hugh3]

As I said elsewhere, even on Telstra's most data-generous plan they charge $69 a month for the first twelve gigs and fifty bucks a gig after that.

Basically they have a pretty tenuous, very expensive 3G network to serve an enormous sparsely populated area and they really don't want people to use it to download large amounts of data. They're happy to sell you a wired link for that purpose.