The folks over at CoolSmartPhone were understandably excited about Orange's announcement that they'd start offering flat rate data plans. Imagine, £8 for unlimited downloads via your smartphone or PDA. Turns out it was too good to be true:

If these are the new plans and all the promised "unlimited" hype simply turns out to be £8 for a 30Mb cap (at best) then I'm infuriated. We've been told a whole load of marketing spin which has not only annoyed Orange customers, but it's also annoyed me because we plastered it all over the front page of Coolsmartphone. I actually wrote this story and said what "great news" it was. I feel like I've let the readers of this site down now that it turns out to be a 30Mb cap.

You can't blame CoolSmartPhone for their excitement, after all, unlimited should mean as much as you want, right? Yes, 30MB could be considered unlimited--5 years ago!

Maybe Orange was trying to hedge its bets. After all providing unlimited data access for thousands of subscribers can be very taxing on a cellular network, with no prospect for profit. But claiming 30MB is unlimited is like saying The Smart PDA doesn't provide daily info on smartphones and PDAs!

The future will be flat. But only if service providers really understand what providing flat rates really means.