Woman Faces $9,100 Verizon Bill For Data She Says She Didn't Use (dslreports.com) 209
A Verizon Wireless customer says she received a bill of $9,100 for hundreds of gigabytes of data usage which never consumed. The woman told the Cleveland Plain Dealer she was on Verizon's 4GB shared data plan, and like any normal person, the bill of $8,535 from Verizon for consuming 569GB of data in a matter of few days doesn't compute well with her. The problem, as DSLR reports, is that when she tried to find out what caused the data usage, Verizon website told her "the activity you are trying to perform is currently unavailable. Please try again later." She couldn't and switched to T-Mobile, after which Verizon charged her a penalty of $600.
New form of measurement? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:New form of measurement? (Score:5, Funny)
One and a half decaplenties.
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One and a half decaplenties.
C'mon, that's a sesquidecaplenty! (At least, if we're going to be sesquipedalian about it.)
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A joke
Sure, coming right up!
"In Soviet Verizon, data uses you!"
Or how about
"I just flew in from Chicago and boy are my arms tired from beating the crap out of these Verizon accountants who tried to defraud me out of ten thousand bucks!"
That last one's more observational humor.
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If $600 is now referred to as a "plenty", what would the $9,100 be?
Depends on the country, but in the US we generally refer to it as a "shitload".
Re:New form of measurement? (Score:4, Funny)
If $600 is now referred to as a "plenty", what would the $9,100 be?
She should just cut them a check for $91.00 -- they'll consider the bill paid in full.
Re: New form of measurement? (Score:2)
link [cleveland.com]
Re:New form of measurement? (Score:5, Insightful)
This, folks, is why you should pay attention to who runs for state attorney general.
Companies get away with this bullshit because private individuals can't hold them to account. It'd cost more than $9100, even counting your time as free, to fight this as an individual. So companies know they can do to you what they please.
This is why we have consumer protection laws, to protect people from bullshit they can't afford to litigate. A shot across the bow from your state's consumer protection bureau counts for a lot more than an angry contract termination call. And if your state AG's office doesn't have a consumer protection division, or if there aren't consumer protection laws in your state, well you're SOL until someone changes that.
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It'd cost more than $9100, even counting your time as free, to fight this as an individual. So companies know they can do to you what they please.
Not necessarily true. In many states small claims court doesn't allow attorneys (or at least it's not unusual to not have one). Fight it. That kind of mentality is why they try this sort of thing. If everyone they did this to took them to small claims court they'd think twice.
Got a "buddy" in the process of suing AT&T like this right now. They've already offered to settle for about 50% of what he was asking for. He's holding out.
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Not necessarily true. In many states small claims court doesn't allow attorneys
Except that Verizon is the plaintiff, so they select the venue. There is no way this is going to small claims. Also, her contract almost certainly says she is required to use binding arbitration. The arbitrator earns millions from Verizon's repeat business and will never see this woman again, so they have an obvious bias.
Re:New form of measurement? (Score:4, Informative)
Secondly, regarding arbitration - even if they produce a contract that they can prove she agreed to (far from a certainty), they're probably not going to want to actually go through with arbitration on a $10K claim.
Thirdly, your last comment is so asinine I'm not sure how to respond to it. The arbitrator is not biased against the litigant because there's some shady deal in which they make "millions" by Verizon bringing them cases. Verizon (and all major corporations) generally avoid actual courtrooms and arbitration whenever possible because it costs one hell of a lot of money (even if they win). So, no, that "obvious bias" doesn't exist except in your fevered imagination. If there's a bias (and I'm certainly not insinuating that the AAA is always as impartial as it claims to be) it wouldn't be for that reason.
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Wow. Uh, no! First off, if she sues them (which is what I was clearly indicating should happen), SHE's the plaintiff.
What is she going to sue for? In order to bring a suit you have to state damages. If she hasn't paid the fine she hasn't been damaged. If she does pay it she's essentially agreeing to it.
You can't just sue to "not pay a bill", unless she somehow wants to somehow claim that receiving the bill caused emotional distress for which she's due compensation (fat chance). She has the choice of ignoring it, and if so Verizon can sue for damages, in which case she'd need to lawyer up in response.
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Not being a lawyer, I wouldn't make a prediction on the "emotional distress" component, though stranger things have happened...
Re: New form of measurement? (Score:3)
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Referring to the patent suits? Those are in Federal court for violations of Federal law. The Feds have no interest in whether one private party owes another $10K.
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At $10K, yes, you're correct; as soon as you get above $75K, though, if the parties are from different states, you can get it into federal court by invoking diversity jurisdiction.
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Who do you think Verizon is going to send to small claims court to represent them? The CEO? Some random secretary? The entire company?
No, it'll be an attorney, or some other class of legal beagle.
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I am really curious, though, for the entertainment value (even if the saner part of me may regret asking). What other "class of legal beagle" were you referring to?
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"small claims court" LOL. That's a good one. Here is how it would go:
Verizon customer: "I have this huge bill that I want to contest".
Verizon lawyer: "We have this arbitration agreement. Customer has no right to be heard here"
Court: "This case is dismissed."
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This, folks, is why you should pay attention to who runs for state attorney general.
Or maybe this is why you should learn to advocate effectively for yourself. Verizon tried to bill me for a data overage a little over a year ago. I called them, told the representative that I thought the bill was in error, and asked him to look at my data usage history over the previous two years. He did, and then not only reversed the overage charge, but gave me a "bonus" package that tripled my monthly data allocation for the next year to compensate me for my inconvenience.
I've gone through similar exerci
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Sure. But you can't completely avoid all contractual entanglements in the modern world, so it's nice to know that the other guy can't dictate terms because he's got you over the barrel.
Re: New form of measurement? (Score:2)
This is contract enforcement, one of the bedrock functions of government in a modern society. It's amazing how people like you create this straw man libertarianism since you don't understand what we actually believe.
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Aversion to big government can be a consistent ideology. You assume that this woman needs government to solve her problem.
It sounds like competition (T Mobile) has provided her an alternative. As for the bill, is it not big government that might cause this woman problems, if it sides with mega-corp to enforce some type of action against her?
Top marks for the Randie impersonation!
Err... you were being ironic, right? It's hard to tell these days.
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Very true. The best analogy I have come up with is that regulation is, or should be, analogous to the landmasses and structures that regulate the flow of commerce and prevent problems like resonances, "water hammer"-like events, and obstructions. An even more obscure analogy - regulations can prevent a too-large shark from going upstream, getting stuck, and blocking the flow, swallowing everything, or just dying and stinking up the place. To the extent that government bodies participate in commerce, they
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Yeah. I was out of state, and 2 days into my new billing cycle i got texts saying i was at my data limit. Called them freaking out, they said it was just an error and ignore it. Which I did. But still seemed like "WTF? Why can't they count how much data goes into or out of my device?", like, it should be the most basic part of their system.
Now, finally... I'm within a month of my contract ending. T-Mobile, here I come!
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That said, our experience all over Florida and the east coast
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That's why I've stuck with Verizon. I live in a small town. Pretty much every major carrier has service here, but for most of them this is the edge of their coverage area - with Verizon it's in the middle.
If I drive even 2 miles outside of town in the wrong direction almost all of them will drop out whilst Verizon will hold a signal out for 20-30 more miles. My parents and my brother both live outside of all the other areas but within Verizon's service area. If I want to have signal when I'm at their ho
"a plenty of $600" (Score:2, Funny)
Thank you for writing the needful.
Ignored Messages (Score:3, Insightful)
Or did Verizon not send them. I get these constantly when I'm towards 90% of my monthly allotment.
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Don't assume competence on Verizon's part. Almost a decade ago a friend of mine got an offer to save a few bucks if she would combine her Verizon cell phone bill with her Verizon DSL bill. She signed up for it, got the first combined bill, and paid it. A few weeks later she got a notice from Verizon Wireless that she hadn't paid her bill. She called to find out what was going on and got the run-around. After enough calls she got someone at Verizon (DSL) to investigate it. They insisted they'd fixed the pro
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Don't assume competence on Verizon's part.
Or any traditional career, of that part. I once had a line on central switchboard but was build separately. The phone company screw up royally, charging $1 04 $2 for calls that should have been a dime. My bill was only a few hundred dollars, and even when I got someone to issue a credit (the commercial people insisted it was a home account, and the home people insisted it was a commercial one) it never showed up on my account.I had faxes stating the credit was applied, at one point the CEO's office rep was
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My kid went to Mexico with her boyfriend and his family for the week.
On Friday, I received three text messages. One stating that the Data limit had been used up and that they were adding more. They second said the data charge was over $1000. The third said that the charge was about $3000 and they turned off the data. All in the span of 3 minutes.
They wanted me to pay them and I told they to go fuck themselves. It will be off my credit report next year.
AT&T, fucking you over like no others.
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That's entirely your and your kids fault, and collections stays on for 7.5 years.
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Somehow you missed where he said "the first message said the data limit had been reached and they were adding more", and the fact that all three messages arrived within 3 minutes. I don't know if any court could hold a customer to that bill, where it is clearly demonstrable that there was a limit in place, and the phone company removed it without authority, and their charges are clearly ursarous if they can reach $3000 in such a short time.
The problem here is that roaming rates have not changed since the 1
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AT&T is the worst. They are on my permanant shit list along with DirecTV, Vonage, and Sprint.
I was house sitting for my boss and taking care of his pets while he went on vacation a while back. He knew that I frequently called my GF in Dominican Republic so he said to feel free to use his land line while he was away but not to spend more than 2 hours per day.
Well... The first night I called and talked for about 1 hour then the line disconnected. It happens sometimes, the phone company in Santo Domingo is
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So I don't understand. If he was billed $2,800 total, that's less than half of what it would have been had you talked for the agreed on two hours per day for four days. In fact it appears that the bill was for one hour per day, which is
i would tell verision (Score:2)
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to go jump in a lake and hich a ride on a slow boat to china, i would NOT fork over that kind of money to ANYBODY, one reason is i dont have it and if i did it would not be going to a god damned phone company
Which is all well and good but Verizon will just turn it over to a collections agency and let them deal with it. Then you are well and truly fucked.
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A link to the real article (Score:4, Informative)
Instead of the crappy DSLReport blurb - http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2016/09/verizon_data_overages_other_ch.html
SpeedTest (Score:5, Funny)
She switched carriers because... (Score:2)
she was afraid of being put on hold.
Verizon Has Issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Verizon Has Issues (Score:5, Insightful)
Just about a month ago, Verizon was reporting that my wife had used some ridiculous amount (can't remember exactly how much) of data on her phone. It turned out that both their website & their phone app were reporting MB as GB. It took them several days to fix it.
Verizon should realize that it's unlikely an individual is going to pay an almost $10k data bill.
So...why do they even allow you to run one up? By default, you should be shut off if you go over "n" times your limit (say your limit is 2G...after 6G, your data service is shut off). That way, Verizon gets their "nominal" overage charges, and nobody's all sue-happy. Why isn't this a thing? If you're some kind of commercial super user, you could sign away that protection, but for 99.44% of their users, it would eliminate this bad publicity.
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That sounds suspiciously like that old 0.02 cent problem. Wasn't THAT Verizon as well?
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I'd suggest moving to somewhere without an extradition treaty before they correct it and add late payment surcharges, it'll be cheaper.
Bills could kill. (Score:2)
I imagine some older person on a fixed income could possibly have a stroke or heart attack from shock at such a bill. With all the algorithms gathering data on the data we use, you think they would invest in making sure of, I don't know, umm.. accuracy?
sue first (Score:5, Insightful)
"I told them that I won't pay the bill,'' Gerbus said. "I can either wait until they take it to a collection agency or when they take it to court. Either way, my credit history will be ruined. I can go bankrupt here.''
It might be wise to consider (or threaten) suing first. Lawsuits bring you to the front of the bureaucracy line, and can resolve the issue without bankruptcy.
Re:sue first (Score:5, Informative)
That's how I resolved my dispute with Chase bank when they did some seriously underhanded sh!t.
I told them that they were trying to get blood from a turnip as I would rather burn my money and go insolvent.
They threatened to sue me, and I replied with: "Please do, I dare you to find a jury that will take your side on this".
After that my interest rate was 0.00000% till my balance was paid.
Re:sue first (Score:4, Funny)
Re:sue first (Score:5, Interesting)
The agreement in question was that I agreed to binding arbitration; the moment they said sue they lost that.
As to the rest of the story, since people asked...
I had a *sizable* life of loan deal with them at 2.99%. (about $30K, rolled a car loan, student loan, etc. into it).
When the banking crisis hit no one wanted to carry these low interest loans with long payoffs, and no one would buy them from the lenders either. Since the agreement was for "Life of loan" they were stuck on the interest rate, but the loophole they found was that the minimum payment was not locked in.
They jacked the minimum payment with only 15 days notice by 250%. Naturally I (and many others) was unable to pay so the account went delinquent. Now that the account was past due they could jack the interest to 29.99% APR. That is $750/mo in interest up from $75/month. I should mention that the day I received the increase notice I tried calling and saying to close my account and that I did not agree to the new terms, I was informed that option was not being made available in this case.
As the account slipped further and further behind I tried an idea based on the common practice of companies like this sending out a check "cash this to enroll in our credit monitoring service" or whatnot.
I drafted a repayment agreement at 0.000% (I did borrow the money, I should pay it back, but by their actions I decided they forfeit being able to earn any money from me) and wrote a check for the first payment.
I looked up their business office (*not* payment office) and mailed the letter and check (both referencing the other and acceptance of terms by cashing check) attention: Account Manager.
They cashed the check, so when I got my next bill showing the payment was made, but the terms not modified I called to inform them of the billing error. Hilarity ensued.
It took nearly a week of back and forth, but finally they threatened to sue me and I replied with my dare.
A brief silence was followed with "please hold on a moment" and a very unhappy but authoritative sounding person basically accepting my offer (they countered that they wanted the balance paid in 5 years, I was offering 6... since they agreed to the 0% interest I agreed to the 12 month acceleration).
-nb
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[citation needed]
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This. If you just ignore it Verizon, or any company, can just claim you owe any amount of money they want and economically you will owe this until you contest it.
that's why they are called service providers (Score:2)
they **** you in the *** every time
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They hunt you in the er2 every time?
Accidental Overage? (Score:2)
You have to very, very specifically _try_ to get that much data on a mobile device. We're talking running torrents, binge watching Netflix 18+ hours a day for the entire month, etc.
While those things are certainly possible, you don't "accidentally" do them. You might acci
It's a billing error, and Verizon needs to own up to it.
On that note: always check your bill, and never, ever let any company have an open ended billing mechanism (e.g. overage charges) against you. Verizon offers "safety mode", you should
Re:Accidental Overage? (Score:5, Insightful)
They actually charge $5 per month extra for that "safety mode". It's ridiculously underhanded and sleazy and one of the reasons I'd rather not use Verizon.
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They actually charge $5 per month extra for that "safety mode"..
Not anymore
This is just another reason I like unlimited. (Score:2)
I don't have to worry If their measurement system messes up and says I used 12ZB of data or I happen to use 5GB on netflix my bill will always be the same.
It's mostly just better for peace of mind.
Verizon's lame Amazon explanation (Score:3)
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If she was streaming a movie from Amazon Instant video that would be just about right.
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400 movies, 1.5 hours each (average?) - if she was streaming continuously it would take 25 days to watch all 400 movies.
At 20Mb/s, if each move was on average 2GB, it would take 10 days to stream all the content (not watch, just the time it takes to download over 20Mb/s.) If you have consistent 20 Mbps over 3G, then your speed is better than I get! (Verizon standard LTE is typically between 5 & 12 Mbps).
So, something is very very wrong, and someone is failing to do basic math verification in their ana
You know Verizon can't do basic math (Score:2)
http://verizonmath.blogspot.co... [blogspot.com]
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She would have to watch several at the same time to manage it within that time period.
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So Verizon's explanation for how the data got so high is apparently because she accessed Amazon 400 times during that period. So they actually think visiting a website 400 times would account for 560 gigabytes of data? Over a gigabyte per visit. How stupid can they be? More proof that signing up with a company that can just randomly bill you whatever they want is not a good idea. Verizon is stuck in the stone age.
AWS.
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At a minimum they should have some kind of customer service flag pop up for agents when an individual calls about an absurdly high bill that's likely to be some kind of billing or data accounting error and that then routes the call to a team that handles them specifically.
A team dedicated to these could eliminate the usual media clusterfuckery that happens when a carrier blindly tries to enforce not-believable billable and flag that person for the data/billing accounting developers so they could possibly tr
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She was thinking of buying an Amazon Fire TV Stick [amazon.com] and decided to read all of the reviews first.
Re:Verizon's lame Amazon explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to rack up ~600GB of data usage in 10 days she would have had to be watching full HD video (~3GB/h) every hour of every day.
Of course that highly unlikely. And it's also highly unlikely it was an unattended device. Amazon, like other streaming providers, requires user interaction after every couple streams to prevent an unattended device from streaming data endlessly.
Additionally, on a small mobile device, Amazon/netflix/etc will not send a full HD stream (3GB/h) but rather a smaller resolution stream suitable for the device (full HD would be utterly useless and just a waste for everyone) and at a small fraction of the full HD bitrate. We're talking a couple hundred KB/s throughput or about 1GB/hour.
So the Amazon excuse it, at best, paper thin. It's a billing error.
Link to more complete source story (Score:3, Informative)
Why not link to the source article [cleveland.com] instead of a summary? It has a lot more detail on what supposedly happened.
Credit Limits (Score:2)
I have long wanted to be able to place a credit limit on my phone such that the phone company will cut me off when I have reached my limit. Much like the credit card companies do.
I skirt the issue by using a provider that pretends to offer unlimited voice and data for a fixed monthly cost, but there are still issues of roaming, cramming and the like.
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I used to do this, and forwarded a google voice number to both SIM numbers so I could get calls no matter what network I was on.
Tings customer service is great too.
Impossible (Score:4, Interesting)
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So, at the speeds Verizon provides me, 569 gig in a few days is a physical impossibility.
Definitely agree with other posters - sue them for the max amount allowable in small claims court. Bet they settle without you ever actually talking to a lawyer.
Wow! That's like seven exploding Samsung Galaxy 7's worth of data!
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works on a contingency basis? no, money down!
70GB in one day on a phone seems unlikey (Score:2)
70GB in one day on a phone seems unlikely. So did they mess up the counting? added some other users phones to their account?
569gb ?! (Score:3)
How does that even compare to the max rate of download those things are even capable of?
Is it based on around the clock downloading which we know isn't reasonable either, especially if there are periods when she wasn't at home or where she could be charging the phone as we know downloading eats up battery at a pretty decent clip.
This looks extremely questionable to me, and potentially impossible to achieve. (Of course somebody with more specific information could do the calculations I can't, and am probably too lazy to do today anyway.)
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So, does anybody want to run the numbers on 569 gigabytes on a cell phone over "just a few days" ?
How does that even compare to the max rate of download those things are even capable of?
In general some would call that a weak effort [news.com.au]
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Yep. I got a notice today, in fact, from Verizon that I was nearing my cap and that it'd be $15/GB over unless I paid $20 to go to the next tier.
I really don't get why they're crowing about faster and faster speeds, 5G, and the like. It's just a recipe for blowing through your plan allowance faster.
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Faster and faster speeds are accomplished not only by using more and wider frequency bands, but also by more efficiently using those frequencies. That means the overall capacity increases and so (theoretically) they could offer more data at the same price.
So yes if your data cap stayed constant you could blow through them faster. Or they could give you mo
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Now that people are used to having, say, a 15 GB per month cap and paying more if they go over it, do you REALLY BELIEVE the telcos will up it to, say, 50 GB per month before you have to pay more just because they switch to a more efficient technology?
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I don't know those exact conditions. But I know for my personal account that I've had with T-mobile my data has gone up over the years while keeping about the same price. I just got an email a week ago that I was getting a 33% increase in data for free.
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Is this a multi line plan or grandfathered something? I have 3 lines for $30 each, 2.5Gb 4g data each then throttled unlimited, and that seemed to be about as good as one could get.
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Verizon are charging (8535/569) $15/Gig? Incredible. Isn't there a US telecoms regulator?
I think AT&T isn't much cheaper. Either the same price or $10 per GB for overage (over the data amount of your plan).
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It's telecoms in general, not just HSI. The cellular companies are horrible, and so are the ISPs (phone companies like Verizon with DSL or GPON/FiOS, and also cablecos like Comcrap with DOCSIS).
Our prices are ridiculous, our service levels are atrocious, and there's no good government regulation keeping these companies in line. ALL of the developed nations (except probably Canada) are much better, along with many of the not-so-developed ones. Romania, for instance, has far better telecom service than the
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Much worse. I would literally suck a dick to get the mobile plans they have in the states.
For that deal, you would have to sign up with Comcast.
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That "service is temporarily unavailable" message earns them extra cash, so why would anybody be surprised that they don't fix it?
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