Telstra's horrendous wireless data plans offer three options - PC Packs (timed charging), Data Packs (kilobyte charging) and Pay As You Go. PC Packs start from $29 for 10 hours per month, with $9.60 per hour excess charges. Data Packs start from a ridiculous $5 for 1 MB per month with $5.12 per excess MB, while the Pay As You Go is an even more ludicrous $20 per MB.

To make matters worse, Telstra is one of the few Australia ISPs that counts both uploads and downloads towards your monthly limit. The charges get slightly more reasonable on higher monthly plans, but you can only use most of these plans if you have five or more Telstra Mobile Broadband services or are a Telstra account-managed customer.

In comparison, Hutchison's 3 network offers 200MB per month for $29, charging only 10 cents per MB for excess data. To really turn up the heat on Telstra, 3 is promising mobile broadband with fixed-line style pricing by the end of March.

You'd think Telstra might respond to such competition by offering more competitive deals, but instead it is jacking up prices of Next G and cutting speeds even further, reports APC.

Telstra previously offered a $29.95 plan with 10 hours usage at up to 1.5Mbit/s speed, but the price has jumped to $34.95 while the speed is cut back to 256Kbit/s -- equivalent to the slowest ADSL available. Aren't prices of new products and services supposed to drop after the few months, once you've squeezed as much as you can out of early adopters?

What's really disturbing is Telstra's pathetic Next G data counter. Until a few weeks ago it was impossible to tell from the phone how much data you'd used. You needed to log in to the WAP portal via the phone, where you were presented with a breakdown of your usage each time you'd accessed the internet - but no grand total. So as you approached the end of the month you were expected to scroll through pages of data, adding up the amounts in your head to see how much data you had left. The list only goes back a week or so, so it was impossible to know how much you'd used. Even if you ring Telstra they can't give you an exact figure over the phone. Telstra has just introduced a graph showing monthly usage, but there are reports inaccurate readings.

Telstra offers to SMS you when you've used 80 and 100 per cent of your allocated data, but it fails to tell you it doesn't send such warnings during the first few months of your plan. As such it's been forced to offer refunds to customers stung by excess data charges during the first few months of their contract.

Just as with fixed line broadband, once again Telstra is relegating Australia to the slowlane through ridiculously high pricing and low data caps. Last week I said we can Forget YouTube, Australia's fraud-band makes online video a pipe dream - this week we can forget mobile data services as well thanks to Telstra's exorbitant pricing. It also helps Telstra kill off any possible competition from VoIP via wireless broadband.

In the cities other networks offer far better value for money, but if you travel all over the countryside then Telstra has you by the wallet and it's squeezing harder.{moscomment}