The launch of Apple’s iPhone 4 also marks the end of unlimited Smartphone data plans from major UK mobile phone companies.

O2, which was Apple’s exclusive UK partner for the iPhone, has introduced a monthly cap of up to 1GB (gigabyte) for data on new contracts. This mirrors a similar recent move by rival Vodafone, and Three has also today announced a 1GB monthly cap.

Some observers expressed surprise at Three’s decision to impose a limit. Ben Wood, a mobile phone analyst at CCS Insight, said: “We had expected that Three would seek to differentiate its offer from rivals by offering bigger data bundles. “It has obviously realised that this approach would see heavy data users signing up and clogging up its network.”

Orange has always imposed a 750MB monthly “fair usage” policy since it started to offer the iPhone in late 2009. But some networks vary their data bundle between 500MB and 1GB per month, depending on the cost of the contract a user chooses.

A 1GB cap amounts to approximately two to three hundred MP3 song downloads in a month. And a message on O2’s website says that a user with a 500MB cap could send 1,000 e-mails with photos attached.

But data consumption can grow very quickly when users start to stream video on their Smartphone.

Source: BBC Technology