Beware the Isle of Man

[SpaceCowboy]

At 7.15pm on 22/12/05, whilst at Birmingham airport waiting for a flight to Belfast, I decided to call one of my mates (who lives in The Isle of Man) from my mobile, to wish him a Merry Christmas.

One of the great things about my contract is that I get free calls to landlines after 7pm and all weekend. Not to The Isle of Man it would seem. I've just got my bill through, that call cost me £19!!!

The reason? Calls to The Isle of Man are "international".

B@stards!

[xiphias]

But it has a standard uk telephone code?

[blaineuk]

i get charged as international when i go there and until recentely my phone would not work at all on the island that time forgot

[icamm]

Not exactly the land that time forgot as they were the first to get 3G and are the first to get 3.5G (HSDPA). So pretty advanced on the mobile phone front. NB: th international thing includes the Channel Islands as well.

[Mr E]

icamm said:

Not exactly the land that time forgot as they were the first to get 3G and are the first to get 3.5G (HSDPA). So pretty advanced on the mobile phone front. NB: th international thing includes the Channel Islands as well.

And if anyone cares, I worked heavily (and indeed am still working) on providing that HSDPA system.

[Raffles]

Mr E said:

HSDPA system.

What's that?

[icamm]

Raffles said:

Mr E said: HSDPA system. What's that?

Next generation standard for data over mobile phone networks. It's an upgrade to 3G (also known as UMTS) and is sometimes called 3.5G. It massively increases the speed of data over the phone network from about 600Kb/s with 3G to a maximum of about 4Mb/s with HSDPA. Final speed will depend on what the operator decides and how many users are on the same cell.