I think some of the other posters are over reacting to this. According to O2, 97% of SMARTPHONE customers use less that 500megabytes a month. They also say that a third of the data used is consumed by 0.1% of customers. So I think the vast majority of customers won't notice any difference.
I'm a heavy user, I surf a couple of hours a day, have 3 email accounts synced,download mp3s and an occasional video. I use about 300megabytes per month.

I just wish they'd annouce the ****ING PRICE!!

So, one hour of iplayer or tvcatchup over 3g is equal to how many MB of usage?

doesnt mean you will be able to buy it any quicker.

No but people want to know how much to put to one side for it.

Well in about 4-5 days they will know.

I would rather know now if I can go out at the weekend or not :P I'm on a budget!

My advice would be, don't go out, you will need all the money you can save!

I would just like to know how much usage an hour of iplayer or tvcatchup uses. Anyone???

350kbps for TV Catchup I believe, so roughly 150MB. The Wifi version has double the bit rate so you'd be done in 2 hours if they hadn't reduced the quality.

iPlayer doesn't work over 3G on o2 sadly.

where are you seeing that

Well im not even a year into a 18mth contract would this mean i could get out early???

Strewth that's quite a bit. Can you reduce it further as the picture is pretty good as far as I have seen so could get away with being reduced a little bit to help us out now all the phone companies are going to start screwing us over.

Fair enough most of the time it will be on wifi but it's a shame we are all going to have this fantastic new phone we are really going to have to be careful how much we use.

It's going to be like getting a sports car and having it limited to 50mph!!!

It's been utterly debunked as crap reporting on the part of certain sites. O2's press release:

http://news.o2.co.uk/Press-Releases/...model-2a3.aspx

Well I don't use too much data for surfing but a lot for TV, youtube, Downloading apps and of course the data the apps use. 10 five minute youtube vids will take you over!! I'll be thinking about leaving O2 now. If the terms of my contract are going to end because I want the upgrade then they can stuff it.......No other reason than I think I was paying enough at £35 for the usage I had......It's easy to see the way its going.....Soon all contracts will have unlimited minutes and the data will cost.....
I'll look at the other plans available across the providers....I may go to an android phone for the right price...iPhone doesn't mean I'm an easy target.....No matter how much I wanted one, I'll never need one..The world will keep turning...

As a PAYG iphone user you might want to consider giffgaff. You could be using their £10 goodybag (a month by month bundle) and get 100 minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data (no caps, no fair usage rules). They can afford to be cheap as they dispense with costly call centres and support is done through their website forums, where customers are encouraged to help solve everyday issues (and get rewarded with payback for doing so). Any account-specific issues are dealt with by dedicated web-based support staff. They run over the O2 network so you don't even need to unlock an O2 phone either. Find out more at giffgaff.com. The free data till the end of June is simply a bonus promotion and is separate from the inclusive data in the £10 and higher goodybags.

Its the MMS at 20p per message that ticks me off.

Wonder will my own contract change to charge for MMS even though it currently takes up 4 texts.

In the last 8 days, I have used 447mb. I would like to see evidence of what o2 is doing to increase capacity to meet customer demand, rather than press releases trying to dissuade customers from using their expensive purchase to its full potential.

I'd say it does make sense that they are investing, given that the usage of data must have gone through the roof since the iPhone and other smart phone devices came onto the market, yet the service quality remains about the same.

While I'm likely to stick with my current Smartphone "unlimited" plan with O2, I do wonder if the new plans with a fixed amount of usage have fewer restrictions on them.

It would be nice to be able to use Spotify (as long as I stick within the limit of the plan).

what do you do to use that amount? At first I thought the 500mb would be alright judging by what my phone tells me.

Now I'm not so sure the iphone bulit in counter is accuarate. In the six months since I've had it, the counter has shown 1.2mb.(I assume it stared afresh when Apple exchanges the phone for a faulty one.). Yet I would swear I use it more than that.

May be worth noting that the 500mb usage will (most certainly) include recieved and SENT data so for me, since tuesday that is 142MB recieved AND 23.3mb sent, totalling abuot 165mb in 3 days!

I use my iphone heavily for business use, email, skype, support center etc.

If you're with O2 you can check your data as far as I can tell on your on-line bill.

Ok so - if I listen to the radio for 50 mins a day 3 days a week and 100 mins 2 days a week - how much data is this going to use up over the month?

I want to know if 500 MB is enough? I don't really want to pay the extra £5 for another 500MB when I could move onto vodafone and get 1GB allowance anyway!

Mind you would 1 GB be enough!

I wil be doing some web browsing too - ie facebook, google, digital spy etc!

I've not had a smartphone of any description before so don't really know how much things use!

The only other options are to not get the Iphone and get a phone with a radio on or getting a seperate radio! (I listen while I'm walking to work ever day!)

Cheers guys!