Is it really only five years since I threatened to write a Telefonica virus? Apparently so.

I still tremble at the thought of the rage that caused me to write a whole column dedicated to the overthrow of Spain’s main telco. These days, the same rage swells up in me whenever I try to use one of those 3G data “dongles” that Huawei is churning out, mainly for Vodafone subscribers.

The problem, half a decade back, was GPRS, of course. Stupidly, I went to visit relatives in southern Spain without a reliable internet feed, and believed the marketing hype from their phone operator about coverage in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range in Granada.

Fortunately, I had borrowed the phone and the SIM from Orange, who was picking up the bill. I spent a week doing half an hour’s email a day, that was all… and when I got back, they reluctantly admitted that the reason they’d cut the phone off was that they honestly thought someone must have stolen it. I’d spent a notional £475 of their money transferring around 20MB of data in total.

These days, of course, you can get far deeper into debt in a week, with High Speed Downlink Packet Access downloading gigabytes instead of megabytes. The transfer rates aren’t anything like the figures quoted in the adverts, of course: when they say 7.0Mbit/s, you can move the decimal point at least one place left. I can occasionally get bursts of 300Kbit/s, but that’s plenty ­ and people who get bills of £4,000 are not just the stuff of urban legend.

It isn’t the bills that are really scary, though, it’s the damage these modern devices can do to your machine. I watched at a recent exhibition as mobile telecoms specialist Qualcomm gave out demonstration dongles to writers. Behind the booth was a queue of distressed journos, all waiting while Huawei engineers desperately tried to fix the TCP/IP stacks.

And the moral of all these stories, I think, is that communications companies really shouldn’t be trusted to write PC software.