[gglanzani]

Slightly OT Well, as an italian living in the Netherlands, allow me to disagree with 3 and have empathy about 4, since we have that in Italy as well.

As for 3, every time I go back to Italy I'm amazed at how much they pay for calling, sms-ing and navigating with their mobiles. Here with Vodafone NL I pay for 15€/month for 400min/sms + 1GB of data. My father in law pays 20€/month for 620min/sms + unlimited data.

In Italy you can forget anything similar to that. I agree that now prices are going up, but that is especially the case when you get a subsidized phone with your plan: there they'll charge you a steep premium. It's very sad but the introduction of smartphone whose price was above 400€ (iPhone, I'm looking at you, not the first but the most popular) allowed the providers to pumps the price saying: "Hey, here this 500€ phone, but let's sign a 1500€ two years contract". People began stupidly falling for these sort of things, and the result is that prices are soaring and people are outraged. In the meantime providers are happy. /OT