Remember to go into the phone's settings panel and turn off "long-distance roaming"; this will prevent the phone from racking up huge data fees on foreign networks.
Some 60percentt of DoCoMo's handset sales now come from the camera phones, whose users also tend to spend more on data transmission fees to swap photos with friends and relatives.
On October 28, Vodaphone's Indian operation cut its data fees by 95% and voice calls by 78%.
Right now, many consumers forgo tablets like the iPad that feature cellular links and instead opt for cheaper ones that have only Wi-Fi, a short-range technology used in many homes, so they can avoid paying another monthly data fee on top of their smartphone bill.
A typical i-mode user spends ¥2,000 (about $17) per month on data-transport fees, and only ¥400 on content subscriptions.Operators therefore generally offer a selection of approved services through their own chosen portal, and also give subscribers the option of going elsewhere.
We've liberated them from a world of so-called "unlimited" plans that have caps on data usage, hidden fees, long-term contracts and other restrictions.
Germany relies more heavily on negotiations between the government and industry groups; Japan relies more on data to establish fees.
Internet providers have attempted to throttle traffic by type or by user (Comcast in 2007), have imposed arbitrary and secret caps on data (AT&T 2011-2014), hidden fees that had no justification or documentation (Comcast in 2016), and tried to give technical advantages to their own services over those of competitors (AT&T in 2016).
The company says that the new plan will be "truly unlimited," meaning there will be no curbs on data transfer speeds, or surprise fees added to a bill.
And the government could help inform students' choices about their tertiary education by publishing, or requiring universities to publish, more data on fees and on the salaries that graduates from different courses command.
