You can lose your mind trying to figure out exactly how much you'll have to pay to use the iPhone 3G.

Just try to make sense of the rate plans Rogers Wireless announced this morning in any of the several place debate has broken out —  Engadget, Facebook or MacRumors Forums. There is even an online petition, but it seems to be made in a pure rage and has an unnecessarily offensive address.

The confusion is intentional. Marketing people say they're tailoring their complex plans to their markets, and they may be right. But don't kid yourself: It works to their disadvantage if customers know precisely how much they will have to pay. As a result, you can't say an iPhone costs $90 a month to use it, while in the United States it costs $60 to use it. It just doesn't work that way.

That would make it too simple. And there's nothing so malleable as confused shoppers, because confused shoppers will at some point throw up their arms and let their emotions take control. And an emotional purchase can often get you in way over your head.

Which is the whole point. I mean, can any people out there tell you off the top of their heads exactly how many gigabytes they download on their phones each month? Could they even make an educated guess?

If you read the online chatter about Rogers, you'll see how people are floundering around trying to sort out whether Rogers is lowering its rates or keeping them high. There's a general consensus that the Canadian rates are still very high, but once you introduce variable factors such as personal telephone and SMS use, comparisons become difficult to make.

And that's particularly true of browsing. The way the Internet works, it's impossible to know how much data you're using (in fact, Rogers makes certain you don't know until your bill comes in) and even more difficult than impossible to guess in advance how much you will be using, meaning you have no idea whatsoever what you're signing up for.

But let's see what we can do. We'll just look at voice and data plans, and drop the SMS texting charges. Rogers and Fido have four plans:

• $60 a month with 150 minutes and unlimited evenings and weekends, 400 MB Data;
• $75 a month with 300 minutes and unlimited evenings and weekends, 750 MB Data;
• $100 a month, 600 minutes and unlimited evenings and weekends, 1 GB Data;
• $115 a month, 800 minutes and unlimited evenings and weekends, 2 GB Data.

The first thing we notice is that none of Rogers' plans offers unlimited data rates. Rogers' iPhone plans seem to be alone in the world in this respect. That's our first clue that these plans are unfair — if only because we have no idea just how much data we will use over the life of the plan, and can therefore not make an informed decision. And that leads us to the second thing we notice: All Rogers' plans are for a minimum of three years, and I know one thing for sure: I have no understanding of how much data I need now, much less how much data I will be needing over the next three years, or even if my usage will increase or decrease during that time.

In short, we're being asked to buy a pig in a poke.

In the same way I hate estimating how many minutes I will want to use for voice-calls on a phone, although that seems to be a little easier to guess.

How does Rogers stack up against the rest of the world? In the following examples, I have cited the U.S. dollar as equivalent to the Canadian dollar, and rounded off the Canadian equivalent of the Euro to the nearest dollar for simplicity's sake.

In the United States, AT&T's approach is to split data and voice plans into two separate packages, with unlimited iPhone 3G data plans available for $30 a month, and voice plans starting at $39.99 a month, for a total of about $79.99 a month.

AT&T says its iPhone 3G data plan gives you unlimited data ... although the word “unlimited” has lost all its meaning after the service providers got through with it. Not exactly unlimited, but then it's separated from the voice plan.

And here's something I have no idea how to compare with Rogers' plans: AT&T asks existing iPhone and new iPhone 3G customers to sign a minimum two-year contract, while Rogers is asking for a three-year contract. Only your usage will determine what that comes out to, and what the rates will be like two years after you sign with AT&T, or whether your usage habits change.

AT&T's monthly data cost is $60, which includes as much data as you want, unless it comes from Canada, in which case you pay $0.015 per kilobyte over 5 GB, or from international sources, and for that you pay $0.0195 per kilobyte over 5 GB.

In Britain, the O2  service provider offers four plans:

• ₤30 ($60), you get 75 minutes of voice calls and unlimited data and Wi-Fi;
• ₤35 ($70), 600 minutes of voice calls and unlimited data and Wi-Fi;
• ₤45 ($90), 1200 minutes voice calling and unlimited data and Wi-Fi; 
• ₤75 ($150), 3,000 minutes voice calling and unlimited data and Wi-Fi.

In  you really want to bend your mind, try to factor in a special gimmick offered by the German service provider T-Mobile, which is to offer the iPhone 3G for €1 ($1.60) if you sign on for the provider's most expensive plan, which is €89 ($142) a month. On the other hand, these rates were set for the original iPhone and T-Mobile has said it won't change them for the iPhone 3G.

In France, service provider Orange is offering five plans, all of them offering unlimited monthly  e-mail and browsing:

• €49 ($78) for two  hours talk time and two  hours of late evening and weekend talk;
• €59 ($94) for three hours talk time and three hours of late evening and weekend talk;
• €79 ($126) for five hours talk time and five hours of late evening and weekend talk;
• €119 ($190) for eight hours talk time and eight hours of late evening and weekend talk;
• €149 ($237) for 12 hours talk time and 12 hours of late evening and weekend talk

Perhaps someone more able than I can crunch these numbers to make sense of them, but from my quick glance I like O2's plans best. But that's assuming I'd be paying those rates while I surf as most Canadians do, which I suspect involves a lot more data transfer than the average European or Briton requires.

Ultimately, I'd prefer any plan that gives me unlimited (if it's really unlimited) data so I could see what the service provider is asking for voice calls. Even then, since Apple decided to give monopoly distributorships to each country, there's nothing to compare the prices to: You couldn't compare any of these plans to any other 3G phone simply because the iPhone is simply a data hog, unlike other phones, such as the new Samsung Instinct or the upcoming BlackBerry 9000.

And how much of a data hog is it? From my reading, I know that it relies on an almost constant stream of data chatter between the iPhone and Apple for such things as software updates.

And I frankly wouldn't even know how to measure that.

(Thanks for tips sent in by several readers, especially Taylor Agnew.)