3's text warnings waking up the country: Don't lose sleep over it!

I got an email from a reader, let's call him Dan as, er that's his name!  Anyway, he'd come across a previous blog post of mine whilst seeking out more info on the text message warning he'd received from 3 UK.  In my original post: 3, give me back 'data usage', give me a heads up and sort out your FUP as it's FUBAR! I mentioned how I got a text message in the middle of the night telling me I'd gone over my fair use limit and that I should cease using data until the start of my next billing cycle.  You can see the text message below:

3 giving me no advanced warning and their link doesn't work either

Today though, it seems Dan wasn't alone - many 3 customers have experienced the same problem in the wee small hours and some, it would appear, have gone nowhere near even the 1 GB limit (let alone the 2 GB that is now the  actual "secret" limit).  Check out Ben Smith's article on SMS Text News: 3UK data ‘fair use’ policy problem and gerrymoth's: No internet for 7 days, I’ll never survive on his nokiAAddict blog.

The problem now seems to be resolved... at least for the time being.  The silver lining is that lots of people have aired their views on 3's notification and billing systems as well as their lack of a data usage meter (we used to have one and it worked but they took it away and don't seem to realise!)

Anyway, other than the beep, beep, beeps of the texts keeping people awake at night, I wouldn't lose any sleep over the warnings.  Below you can see my bill that I've just received for the period when I was warned.  The first picture is of the summary.  The bill quite clearly states that I've not used even one meg outside of the allowance...

3 data usage summary - Bill date: 13th May '08

And below is a break down of each day's use.  You can see I kept on using the internet on my phone after the warning, albeit more sparingly!  You can also deduce that the fair use allowance is clearly more than the 1 gig mentioned in the small print.

Day by day breakdown (I was warned on the 1st)

It's a shame they haven't gotten their act together on this as otherwise 3 UK's data/internet offerings are great and, IMHO, can't be beat.  Having said that I have a sneaky suspicion of late that they may have throttled my service as Nokia Internet Radio isn't working nearly as well as it used to be but I need to do a bit more digging and delving to find out if that reall is the case or not.