O2's bringing the iPhone to Ireland on March 14th
By Paul Miller 
posted February 28th 2008 9:46AM
posted February 28th 2008 9:46AM
Update: Some tipsters have pointed out that O2 Ireland makes no mention of Visual Voicemail on its iPhone pages, which is odd considering the fact that O2 UK highlights the feature. It could be a oversight, or it could mean that those unsightly tariffs are, in fact, true highway robbery.
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
"selling the 8 gigger for €399...to €100 for 700 minutes..."
so you pay a quarter the price of the phone a month!?!
The rates are high for voice and sms services but the built in data allowance even on the lowest tariff is dramatically better than any other competing data tariff's in Ireland. The nearest equivalent from Vodafone Ireland offers a similar number of minutes but only 25Meg of data and a €5 per megabyte charge for any use over that. The small size of the Irish cell market has allowed the carriers to keep data charges at exorbitant levels and this offer from O2 is the first practical way to get a good data deal.
If you were to use the 1Gig allowance for example on a Vodafone contract here it would cost you almost €5k. Vodafone have a "Mobile Internet" offering that looks comparable but in reality the 500Meg data allowance that provides only allows access to a highly restricted Vodafone walled garden (e.g. you can't even access Google.com from it). 3 have a good mobile data package in theory but their traffic "management" also prevents many things one might reasonably expect to be able to do (like set up a third party e-mail client for example).
You can get much better data rates here for mobile data cards or if you have a business account but this is the first realistically priced mobile internet offering here in Ireland, even if it does appear expensive by the standards of more competitive markets.