I have to admit to being a little surprised at this notion, and the press release headline which screamed “slow customer response times costing smaller enterprises crucial new business”, as I was under the impression that pretty much everyone had heard of this thing called the internet by now.

I wouldn’t argue with the hypothesis that responding quickly to customer demand is both key to business success and a challenge facing many at the smaller end of the SME scale. Nor would I take offence at the suggestion that social media uptake and a 24-hour society culture is driving customers to expect instant commercial gratification. Indeed, much of the research is a fascinating confirmation of the changing face of the small business today:

* 78% of those businesses asked said that providing a fast response to customer queries was their biggest source of competitive advantage

* 33% blamed an inability to respond quickly enough to customer enquiries for the loss of contracts

* 79% of SME managers expect employees to respond to customer phone calls immediately during office hours, regardless of their location, and 32% expect them to respond immediately to enquiries made via social media

All of that pretty much squares up with what I would have thought people would say, although the social media response demand was a little surprising, but it does reflect the growing importance of Twitter and Facebook as a potential sales channel.

My problem comes with the fact that the research was carried out for Vodafone and appears to be a sales pitch for mobile phones and managed communications. Tom Craig, Vodafone’s business services director, argued that small businesses are recognising that managed communications that instantly route unanswered incoming calls to mobiles are increasingly seen as vital to small business, yet 40% of those asked said there was a lack of budget to fund the technology. And now we get to the real pitch, a subscription-based managed communications model sending those calls to mobiles being offered by Vodafone.

Which is great, but I repeat: hasn’t everyone in business discovered the internet yet? Being able to talk to a human being is one factor in closing deals, but getting an instant response by email, or talking to an online sales advisor using an instant chat system, or maybe just having a decent e-commerce system in place which can fulfil orders 24/7 and provide access to those enquiry channels, is the real answer to the problem of competitive advantage in 2011 and beyond.

In an age of instant gratification for all things, including business deals, the internet and not mobile phones is the killer app.

While the EU has indeed made progress, we’re a long way from popping the champagne corks and declaring a famous consumer victory.

Look, for example, at the data rates. The EU’s new rules still allow mobile networks to charge up to 1 Euro (86p) per MB for data downloads when roaming. That’s £880 per GB! To put that in perspective, BT charges £15.65 per month for a 10GB data download allowance on its Option 1 package; mobile networks can theoretically charge £8,806 for the same amount of data! And I’ve yet to see any compelling evidence that the costs associated with mobile data are an order of magnitude higher than they are for fixed line providers.

You might also want to reflect on the charges for SMS text messages. While the EU has now capped the cost of text messages to 9p (down from 24p), that’s still 9p for transferring only 140 bytes (0.000133514MB) of data. That’s a princely £674 per MB.

Dr Nigel Bannister from the University of Leicester last year claimed that sending texts from a mobile phone was four times more expensive than downloading data from the Hubble Telescope, and that was based on an average text message fee of only 5p.

So while the EU can take some satisfaction from today’s price cuts, mobile data prices are literally still out of this world.

But while Twitter has undoubtedly played a major role in events, there’s a technology which I think has been even more pivotal. I’m talking about camera-phones — such as the one that captured the last living moments of a young Iranian woman named Neda, shot dead during a protest on Saturday in the streets of Tehran.

The shocking footage has quickly propagated around the web, arousing horror and outrage in Iran and across the globe. Without a doubt it’s given the protests new fuel and new focus: I’ve seen more than one Iranian Twitterer describe Neda’s death as the turning point that persuaded them to join the uprising.

Interestingly, though, it’s been unofficially estimated that on the day Neda died, over a hundred other protesters were also killed in Iran — yet no one’s rallying around them.

Partly, of course, that could be because Neda was a young woman, who appears to have been acting wholly peacefully when she was murdered. It’s easy to get angry about her death, while with other protestors we simply don’t know the circumstances.

But that’s the important point: we don’t know, because however tragic the other deaths may have been, they weren’t captured on video. We can only ever know of them at second hand. And for that reason they’ll never provoke a reaction as visceral and emotional as what we feel when we actually see the life slowly fade from Neda’s eyes.

Clearly, it’s impossible to say what will happen in Iran over the coming days and weeks, but the protests don’t seem to be petering out — if anything, dissatisfaction with the regime is growing. With a general strike now brewing alongside continued unrest we could conceivably be heading for a major shake-up of power in Iran.

And any success the protesters achieve will have been made possible not by external influence — but by the camera-phone, and the incredible rallying power of a humble video file.

Vodafone might have thought it was a nice piece of face-saving PR to cut the poor chap’s bill down to £229, but as PC Pro forum member Amnesia10 rightly commented on the article, “From £31,000 to £229!!!!  How could it afford to write this off?  If it were a genuine cost it would not write it off so easily.”

Quite. So we asked Vodafone how it managed to wipe more than 99% off the bill? A company spokesperson assured us that Vodafone did take a financial hit on the write-off. How much? She wouldn’t say.

Anyone want to bet it’s £229?

Update: Vodafone says the bill was actually from last September and new measures put in place since then would have prevented our intrepid Prison Break fan from running up such a colossal bill.

There’s the 600 free minutes (which, being a man, is 599 minutes more than I’ll actually need. Hi mum, by the way), 500 free texts and unlimited web browsing. And what’s this in paragraph three?

Barely able to contain my excitement, I flip over the page to find:

I can’t tell you how lucky I feel.

Not content with merely letting you listen to the latest hit singles from around the world (and several hundred stations intent on playing nothing but Wham! till the world ends), this new entry from Orange brings something new, and somewhat inevitable, to the table.

You see, Orange has an online iTunes-style music store which sells tracks for 99p. In case you weren’t aware, it also has a little mobile phone network across the UK. Now it has an Internet radio too, some bright spark put 1 and 1 and 1 together and came up with £££. Linking the three, when you hear a track you like you just press a magic “Favourite” button on the radio, and the next time you switch on your PC you’ll find the track there ready to download from the Orange store, or even send to your (Orange, obviously) phone.

It’s such a simple, money-spinning idea I was amazed I’d not seen something like it sooner, but apparently it’s all down to metatagging: the info that identifies the artist, track and the rest is only currently broadcast by some radio stations. Orange reckon most major UK and US stations should be compatible, but as the number grows expect to see this service become the norm – and I (for once) am not complaining.

Look out for a full PC Pro review soon.