Data roaming charges

I've been pretty pleased with the service I've had from O2 since moving to my iPhone. OK, it's not the cheapest tariff in the world, but you do get unlimited data which is very handy on such a data intensive device.

Anyway, annual overseas holiday is looming (not fast enough in my opinion), and I checked out the O2 web site to see what's what. I knew I couldn't use my unlimited data plan abroad.

Basically, it seems I have three options.

1. Do nothing (i.e. don't get any add on), and get charged £2.94 per MB (Western Europe) for all the data I use.
2. Take out a "Data Abroad 10" data roaming bundle, where I get 10MB (per billing month) for £20
3. Take out a "Data abroad 50" data roaming bundle as above, that'll give me £50 MB but will cost me £50.

I reset my usage stats on the iPhone on Friday evening to get a feel for how much data I'm using. Bear in mind that I was playing out playing cricket for about 9 hours yesterday so hardly used the device, and it's been busy at home with family today so I haven't used it much either, I've still managed to rack up nearly 7MB in that time. That's almost exclusively Twitter, fetching RSS feeds and a few emails (no major attachments in there).

If I did that on holiday, a 10MB bundle ain't going to last me very long, but I'm not fancying the idea of adding another £50 to my holiday spending for data (skinflint). At this point, looks like I'll take a 10MB bundle, and restrict myself to a few tweets and a daily RSS download, and maybe check emails a couple of times week (not work emails I hasten to add).