AT&T Slaps Family With a $19,370 Cell Phone Bill 725
theodp writes "Mama, don't let your babies send e-mail and photos from Vancouver. A Portland family racked up nearly $20,000 in charges on their AT&T bill after their son headed north to Vancouver and used a laptop with an AirCard twenty-one times to send photos and e-mails back home. The family said they wished they would have received some kind of warning before receiving their chock-full-of-international-fees 200-page bill in the mail for $19,370. Guess they didn't read the fine print in that 'Stay connected whether you are traveling across town, the US, or the world' AT&T AirCard pitch. Hey, at least it wasn't $85,000."
Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
And this is tagged "apple" why?
This is not about an iPhone just because it's about AT&T.
Perhaps some confusion about the brand Aircard (Score:5, Informative)
The branding "Aircard" is close enough to "Airport" some readers may assume it refers to Apple equipment instead of stuff manufactured by Sierra Wireless [sierrawireless.com].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it that simple? Will that make it go away? You won't just get jailed and still have to pay it (and maybe much more?)
But yes, one would hope they would find it unreasonable themself and not charge it.
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you're not far wrong. By default the iPhone disables international data roaming, you have to explicitly tell it you want to use data when not on your home network.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Steve Jobs did nothing.
What?!? Do you mean to tell me that the president of the company that made the phone refused to help with a bill from the carrier? Why how selfish of him not to intervene in a dispute that didn't involve Apple!
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
No, I expect him to wiggle his butt.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You must feel like a big man, refuting an obvious joke. Next try poking holes in the one about the three rabbis that walked into a bar.
Re:Apple? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh Noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
How about just a meter on the phone that says "how much this is costing you" and/or "how much you owe so far"
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Interesting)
I blame the fine print. They are so verbose that you could be agreeing to anything.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Informative)
You _are_agreeing to anything - and everything. One of the contract terms in almost all contracts is that they can change the terms. Granted, they must notify you and they aren't allowed to charge ETFs if you cancel because of it. But you are not allowed to 'lock-in' services just because they 'lock-in' two years of service. In short, you can't hold them to their own contract so long as they 'notify' you.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, but having to sign it in blood should have made them suspicious!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I blame the fine print.
When I got iphone it had international roaming turned off by default, with a specific warning along the lines of "if you turn this on, you may get fees." It seems pretty straightforward to me and it would take an informed click-through to activate it (I think?).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I had to call my provider to have international roaming turned on, they do it so idiots don't run up huge bills then fail to pay and leave the carrier owing money to their roaming partners.
Here in Australia you have to go overseas to use international roaming so its not as important, but in Europe or the United States people should be allot more careful.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
> Fees, yes. 100x what you normally pay? Not so much.
Which brings up another point... just TRYING to get a straight answer out of most carriers about the exact charges (taxes, "fees", surcharges, and all) that will be incurred is damn near impossible. Even if they give you an answer, it will always be with a disclaimer that effectively lets them off the hook if they're wrong, and gives them free reign to add on as many other fees as they like. About 3 years ago, it took me about 40 minutes with 3 Sprint reps to get a straight answer about how much it would cost to use my phone as a modem while roaming in Canada. And best of all, the rep was wrong, and the ultimate charges were about 40% more than I was quoted.
Telling someone, "additional charges may be imposed" is bullshit. Throwing up a Windows Mobile dialog box the first time you try to initiate a data session in a foreign country that says something like, "If you continue, each kilobyte of data you send or receive will cost US$3.74 including all applicable charges, fees, taxes, and tarrifs... do you REALLY want to continue? would be another matter.
IMHO, this IS an intellectually-consistent libertarian position. Libertarianism assumes free-market transactions made between informed buyers and sellers. If the seller has a government-protected monopoly or oligopoly, and can't/won't even give the buyer a straight answer about how much something is going to cost, the seller has no right to complain if a court sides with the customer when they try to turn around and impose charges amounting to roughly 200 times a normal monthly bill.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So? Don't sign it. It is exactly this kind of mentality that has brought down the housing market.
Sorry, no. The bust must follow any boom, doesn't matter whether it is housing or tech stocks or commodities, our money is still based on debt, and debt is an exponential function.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
and it's that kind of attitude that popularized predatory lending practices which created the current mortgage crisis. similar systemic problems have also been observed in the credit card industry, with credit card companies intentionally targeting the most financially distraught members for higher credit ratings knowing that they won't be able to pay off their debts.
if you lend money to someone who you know can't pay you back or afford the interest rate, and then they file for bankruptcy as a result, why should anyone bail _you_ out when you're in financial trouble? in these cases it's not borrowers who are trying to convince lenders to approve loans they know they can't afford it. it's usually the other way around, where the lenders convince borrowers to take out loans that any conscionable lender should know not to approve.
most people who fall victim to these practices are first-time homeowners. they're not mortgage industry professionals who are familiar with lending contracts. so it is understandable that they can be misled to sign into a loan which they are unable to pay back. such excuses cannot be made for the lenders. they should be well versed in sound lending practices.
the deceptive use of fine print doesn't clear a business of responsibility for unethical business practices.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, unethical behaviour does not necessarily correspond to illegal behaviour.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
that's very true. but that's why it's important to report these type of stories.
even though you can't legislate ethical behavior, a well-informed public aided by a responsible media can help to bridge the discernible disconnect between morality and legality. that's why it's important to have media institutions which have a sense of journalistic integrity. bad publicity can often still make profit-driven corporations do the 'right thing'.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
bad publicity can often still make profit-driven corporations do the 'right thing'.
Because the "right thing" never happens on its own because someone is "profit driven."
I know that I, being profit-driven and therefore working a full-time job, ran over 3 orphans on my commute this morning.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a very interesting stance. Especially considering that visitors to the US have to fill out that weird sheet which has the following question:
"Do you intend to do anything illegal or immoral while in the US?"
It's a yes/no question, which is rather annoying. While people in New York might find it immoral for me to use the services of a prostitute in Nevada, it's not illegal. So ... which one do I cross off?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
well, that's sorta like saying someone who's dumb enough to get conned/scammed deserves to be scammed. i certainly don't promote ignorance (in fact, i find the overwhelming level of ignorance in our society quite frustrating) but you can't support, or let businesses get away with, unethical predatory lending practices.
and let's be honest here, who has never missed/skipped over a few lines of fine print when signing some kind of business contract? whether it was through conscious choice or accidental, we've all skimmed over parts of contracts or legal forms to some degree. i mean, who has never misread a word or sentence while reading a book/newspaper/magazine/street sign/etc.?
the very nature of fine print is inherently deceptive. that is precisely why businesses use fine print to conceal warnings, disclaimers or terms/conditions which consumers may be put off by. you can call the use of fine print a marketing tactic to make your service/product look more appealing. and it's considered completely legal usually. but at some point this kind of manipulation of consumers crosses into overt dishonesty.
if you have a 20-page cellphone contract full of verbose wording for trivial details and standard terms of agreement, but buried near the back you have, in fine print, a special clause that requires the signee to hand over all his personal assets to you and surrender himself to disciplinary flogging if he uses his phone to make a business call on the sabbath, then this probably wouldn't be considered a legally-binding contract by any sane court.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
PMI is a big scam. It is insurance for the banks, but YOU have to pay it. Heck, I could be paying my mortgage down another couple of hundred per month if it wasn't for the insurance I have to pay to cover the banks butt. And I've never missed a payment, yet my premium stays the same. PMI is a scam that was lobbied for by the lenders and made law by the government as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since you have to pay more money than you shou
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
So? Don't sign it...
If all the cell providers have basically the same contract, then there is no real choice. You're not dealing with a free market when providers collude to fix service agreements, you're dealing with a cartel. And as long as there are self-righteous apologists sticking up for the cell phone cartel, nothing is going to change.
AT&T runs commercials all the time advertising their accessibility in Europe and overseas. I don't remember anywhere in there hearing that charges could be as high as $20,000.00. If AT$T had to disclose that in a service contract, no one would sign up for their service.
It's time consumers stop being victimized by service contracts where one side reserves the right to change the terms at any time. That's not a contract, it's a hostage. And stop wagging fingers at consumer caught in silliness like this. These people could very well be facing financial ruin.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Interesting)
Having a phone is nearly a necessity for the modern world (how do you call out sick when you can't place calls?), and often a landline just does not cut it (need to be locatable 24/7?), unless you want to have both a landline and a pager (plus, what good is a pager when fortress phones are getting harder and harder to find?).
I think there should be some legal restrictions to discourage the excessive use of "fine print." (For example: All wording on a contract must be legible to someone with 20/20 vision at a distance of two feet, or the contract is not enforceable.) A silly law? Well, yes, but when corporations choose to behave in a silly way, the only way to try to maintain some semblance of fairness is usually through silly laws.
(While we're on the subject, how about requiring contracts to be at a 12th-grade reading level or below to be enforceable? "Use a dictionary," "ask your English-major friend for clarification," you say? I say, "Oh, miss Cingular rep handing me something to sign, go fetch a dictionary for me, pronto. And, while you're away from your desk, I'm going to borrow your phone to call an English major I know." On a computer, you might have a dictionary at your disposal 24/7---in real life, you should not be expected to carry one for day-to-day affairs if you have a high-school level of education!)
If the legal term for signing a contract is going to continue to be "contract negotiation," rather than "bending over and letting a corporation stick it to you without any lube," I would like more emphasis on the *negotiation*.
"Okay, miss Cingular rep. Now, I'll sign your paper if you'll sign mine saying that, before you charge me more than 50% above my minimum monthly pay ment, someone from Cingular is expected to receive confirmation from me *in writing* that I acknowledge and am fully aware of the additional charges. See, this is called NEGOTIATION. You have your terms, I have mine."
Oh, attn large corporations: you would not have to re-invent yourselves as "the new ____" (ex. the new AT&T) if people felt they could trust "the old ____." Let your PR branch drool over that for a while, eh?
[Disclaimer: I am very careful about signing contracts, and have been known to (inadvertently) annoy whoever is asking me to sign something for hours and hours on end until they clarify every detail of the fine print. I have not yet reached the point of asking if I can tape record their explanations of the fine print, but that's just because I have not yet been forced to that point! *g*]
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
So? If they are it's their own fault. They claimed that they both read and understood all the nuances of the contract when they accepted it. They have no excuse for being surprised by the financial repercussions.
Should people be free to enter in to ANY kind of contract? Suppose the contract stated that if you didn't pay your bill on time you would become indentured to the phone company until such time as you paid the bill? If you're in really hard straits should you be able to sell yourself into slavery?
Boilerplate contracts are generally enforcable, but courts have discretion to determine the fairness of any such contract. This is for good reason - they don't represent a meeting of the minds, but rather a deal in which one side has far more bargaining power than the other. When every phone provider in the country has onerous terms your only option is to not own a phone.
Go ahead and try to live without a credit card, phone, cell phone, internet, or anything else that requires signing a boilerplate contract with one-sided terms. Sure, you can still live that way, but why would you want to? You can't even go to the hospital without signing a boilerplate contract. In some cases you can be treated as if you had implied consent to a contract if you were treated while unable to make decisions.
Look - I'm fairly libertarian - more so than most. However, consumer protection laws are very necessary in this day and age when just about every cost-effective industry is an oligopoly.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know how it works in the usa but in the uk at least, phone companies have credit limits for contract phone users. If you exceed your limit they ask you to make a payment before you can make outgoing calls again.
The negatives the Credit limit is regularly revised and raised provided you pay your bill on time, with the only way of getting it held or lowered to pay your bills late. (which messes with your credit rating)
In theory you shouldn't end up with a bill that you can't pay, (want to pay is a dif
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Interesting)
I travel extensively for my work, and have regularly hit my "credit cap", which I believe is around the £600 mark. This normally entails paying the bill two or three times a month over the phone to keep outbound service (and GPRS - when I am switched to incoming only, my service is restricted to GSM, so mail stops coming to my BlackBerry).
I have had bills of £2000-£3000/month before, but this was astronomical and wholly unexpected. It turns out that it was almost all data usage (about £350/day), and it was the GPS application on my BlackBerry (8800) downloading map data on the fly. The BlackBerry GPS app and Google Maps do not cache maps on your handheld, and will run in the background if merely "exited" as opposed to "closed", so beware!
My response was to ask why my "credit cap" hadn't kicked in, and the explanation offered was that partner networks do not provide daily updates on roaming data use, instead providing weekly or monthly totals - i.e. T-Mobile didn't know how much I had run up until the end of the month.
I stated my position clearly - that I would not pay, I would attend a court if they attempted to force me to pay, I would not retain a lawyer and the entirety of my defence would be: "They want £10,000 for one months service".
I explained that I would, if pushed, demonstrate that these were disproportionate charges, and the repercussions of bringing such a case against me could be severe.
I displayed my intent by emailing recordings of my conversations with customer reps to Jim Hyde, the MD of T-Mobile UK, which included such gems as "Well you are entitled to a discount on data within the EU, but that obviously doesn't include Brussels."
We settled for £3,500.
I then made it my business to find a contract which includes unlimited international data.
Not one of the UK networks will offer this in a consumer tariff, and in the end it was only O2 who said to me: "Oh you can add that as a "Bolt-On" to any business contract for £20/month.
No other company offers anything like unlimited roaming data, and I was shocked at how cheap it was to do. It has slashed my bills by literally thousands of pounds, to say nothing of the savings on hotel and airport internet.
As an aside, O2 is the UK partner network for the iPhone - but there is no iPhone "business" tariff that will allow you to bolt on international roaming as I have done with the BlackBerry. Not too troubling until they provide above-board tethering anyway.
And as a final note, will somebody please sort out the £ sign when posting from the AJAX box!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok - I signed a cell phone contract. I know that it gives the phone company the right to:
1. Charge me huge fees for non-routine items like data transfer - especially outside of a coverage area. And it might not be obvious if I'm outside that coverage area.
2. Require binding arbitration of any disputes.
3. Require me to keep secret any settlement or judgment I get against the phone company so that others don't realize that they can win in court.
That doesn't make any of that legal. I never "agreed" with
Read Contracts & Limits aren't carriers want (Score:5, Insightful)
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
I expect that in a world where most either read their contracts in great detail (and are sufficiently educated to understand the ramifications) or refused to sign anything that took them more than a minute to read, this would work out great. I'm not sure which plan you're advocating, though, and I expect either plan would actually impede carrier sales.
I would think that in the interests of PR, AT&T might send you a text or something when you go international roaming and pass some threshold of use, just to warn you. But really, if you pay extra to call Canada long distance, don't you think your cell phone/data card would work the same way?
I think the particularly telling piece of information is that if you want a plan where they do limit your charges and notify you when you reach thresholds.... you have to pay extra. They're called prepaid plans, and there are no surprises (well, within limits), but for common use cases, it's guaranteed you'll pay 2-4 times the amount a customer on a given rate plan will.
Why the cell phone companies can't combine the limits on prepaid plans with conventional rate plans is an interesting question, but I suspect the answer is not a technical limitation.
Re:Read Contracts & Limits aren't carriers wan (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought cell phones ran credit checks... don't customers have a credit limit like a credit card would have? Why are the telcos allowing such huge overages over what plan you are credit approved for? They know your credit score and reasonable limit,why are they not following that on these cell plans?
This is like the old-school days when mechanics would have you sign to "fix" your car, then replace the parts with 10x what they costed and huge labor costs then not let you have your car back... in response we passed law saying they had to tell you charges BEFORE work started and return the used parts. Expecting telcos to honor the credit checks they perform should be expected as ethical behavior.
Re:Read Contracts & Limits aren't carriers wan (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, T-Mobile does. It's called Flexpay, and your service gets cut off (at least for the rest of the billing cycle) when you reach your limit. And they have the same plans that normal postpaid accounts do. You can even buy your phone at full retail price and not even have a contract. You can cancel at any time.
I'm n
Re:Read Contracts & Limits aren't carriers wan (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty funny seeing you guys talk about this as if it's a novelty! "Pay as you go" is very common in the UK and has been for at least 8 years. For the levels of usage that I used to have as a student, a contract wasn't worth it - especially as contracts back then only gave you about 100 free texts a month, unless you wanted to pay crazy money.
Incentive to limit profit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. It is definitely not a technical limitation, but designed to enhance profits.
I am always irked when I travel to a new city, spend $60 on my VISA card, and am called 5 minutes later for a "fraud alert" early warning. Or, better yet, dine in a restaurant in another city and have it "declined for my safety" due to unusual activity.
For any of you guys saying "Oh, this is good," remember this is designed to protect the Credit Card company, not you. Almost all cards limit your responsibility to $50 for fraudulent transactions. You can rest assured if you were responsible for your own well being, as in the case outlined, you would not get an early warning. Similarly, there is no financial incentive to do so in the case of AT&T above, who can now harass the customer to pay a huge amount of money, and then look "generous" to let them off with only a couple of hundred dollars in fees.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Call your card company to let them know of your travels ahead of time and they will not call you. It is there for your protection.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Interesting)
Roaming is something of a scandal over here in the EU, where we pay astonishing fees to use our phones a couple of hundred miles away with the same company we're signed on to at home. The European Commission has acted against roaming charges before now. [bbc.co.uk]
In a similar case recently, a woman was charged £4900(c. US$10000 at the time) by Vodafone because she used a 3g internet connection to watch the Apprentice on iPlayer from France. Vodafone waived the charges in the end.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
What planet are are you from? One where it really is OK to charge 6 months wages to send email using a system in use by millions of people.
Its a sign the markets aren't competitive, the corporations immoral and some individuals so brainwashed that they blame the victim.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, AT&T (or Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile, et al) make $$$ as the "home" carrier, but the real cost in roaming is the fees the home carrier has to pay to the local provider. And for the iPhone (which this case apparently isn't), Apple gets its shill too.
Unfortunately it isn't cheap, but how does this make the corporation immoral? It costs BILLIONS to build out the telecom systems worldwide. And yet, they are supposed to make a profit for their shareholders and pay a ton of bucks to state, local and federal governments in taxes and fees. They won't give airtime and data bandwidth away for free...nor should they.
If the user is ignorant enough to not pay attention to legal contracts and published billing tariffs, then they must be a victim of modern day Darwinism.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Interesting)
The funny thing is that the guy was in Vancouver, so he was using Rogers. Rogers charges Americans roaming in Canada LESS for data than they charge Canadians who are not roaming.
The bill would have been MUCH higher if he lived in Vancouver.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
So now we need to tell people what they can charge for their service?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How much would sending the data with a pre-pay sim on this foreign network have cost? $10? Less? Let's assume that this network hates AT&T and charges them an order of magnitude more than it charges random people off the street with no contract, so it's $100. That means the other $19270 is pure AT&T profit. This kind of pricing is why the European regulator is investigating the EU mobile phone companies for price fixing on international roaming charges for data (where the per-MB cost is often m
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
We also do not have 70% tax rates like Europeans have (ours are 35-40%)
Nice straw man. Income tax in the UK is 20%, with an extra 10% national insurance (which covers social security things, and is optional, although you can't claim a state pension unless you've been paying it for 30 years). In terms of total tax paid by the average citizen, the UK has a lower tax burden than the USA (Google it - study published around 18 months ago). When you factor in the fact that few people pay for health insurance here, it works out even cheaper. Only a few countries in the EU have ta
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering I have ATT, I travel internationally, I use data to work using VOIP and RDP over VPN when I do so and have never had a bill from them exceeding $300, yeah, I find this pretty fucking ridiculous.
It is reasonable to expect charges in Canada to be roughly the same as roaming agreements for many years have included Canada as a basic service. Yeah, it's AT&T's fault if they weren't told they needed that for CANADA when they TOLD THEM THEY WERE GOING THERE.
I can see charging, double, triple, even ten times as much barring that petty nickle-dime $14 (or whatever the hell it is these days) service fee for included international roaming, but 32,200% more? I'd say that's a tad out of line because you know full well AT&T is buying that airtime in bulk and sure as shit isn't remitting more than about a couple ten bucks of that $19,320 to fucking Rogers.
Re:Oh Noes! (Score:4, Informative)
You charged me exactly what it said in the contract I signed said you would! How dare you.
That's the wrong way to look at it.
I spend a good chunk of my time negotiating contracts with clients and vendors. Contract negotiation is a fantastic time sink, and only trained lawyers with years of commercial experience are fully competent to read and interpret contracts. I pay mine $250 an hour, and he's worth every penny. Can you imagine going through that effort for every pack of gum, movie ticket, or car repair?
To avoid that, we have a number of mechanisms to make it so that people don't really have to understand the deals for common activities. They just trust that thinks work reasonably and in the usual fashion. Those mechanisms include the Uniform Commercial Code [wikipedia.org], a host of regulators, a variety of case law, and a bunch of rules imposed by wholesalers, retailers, credit card processors, and other middlemen.
That AT&T has set things up so that reasonable behaviors yield unreasonable results is a mistake on their part. Whether or not a regulator can or will beat them up in this case, I dunno, but they'd be fools not to clean this problem up pronto. If people get scared to use new services because of stories like this, it costs them a lot more than $20k; it can cost millions.
My bet is that AT&T will waive most or all of the charges, and in the long term look at implementing better notifications and limits.
Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
Some people here will undoubtedly react in this topic, saying that this family "brought it onto themselves" or "should have read this or that".
I'm saying I'm disgusted, utterly disgusted how these companies treat their customers. Why isn't there a procedure in place that calls the customer upon reaching some limit like $500 or $1000 and warns them?
Why not? I'll tell you why. Because this is how the world works. But I'm still disgusted.
Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd warn a lot earlier. Like when you're 50% over your plan.
Contract or not, this isn't a business game, it's a game of gotcha with customers.
Lure people in with words like "unlimited," "free," "included" and then trickily word an overly verbose contract to make exceptions for everything.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't even a matter of clauses buried in fine print. The problem is that this is "standard practice" and it is anti-consumer. Even if the first line in the agreement was 48 point and said "note that when you use your phone internationally you could end up being assessed charges far in excess of normal" it wouldn't be fair. It should simply not be possible to use a phone in a way that could run up that kind of a bill. If nothing else phone providers should be required to allow their customers to set a monthly limit on their spending - if the provider somehow lets the consumer go over the limit without express consent from the account owner they end up eating the cost.
And I don't want to hear about how roaming billing cycles are too slow to allow that kind of realtime assessment of charges. If they can route a 32kbps digital phone call from my home to a point halfway around the world such that it only takes 2 seconds for the phone to start ringing and there are no gaps in the audio, then they can send a 10-byte estimate of the cost of the call per minute and do a database lookup.
Re:Disgusted (Score:4, Interesting)
Are there any other parts of living where something that usually costs 60 dollars per month can suddenly balloon out to 20,000 dollars per month without explicit user intervention? Even credit cards call you when usage patterns start looking strange.
Of course, the real problem is that people are getting *horribly* overcharged for international data roaming. I'm sorry, AT&T charges twenty dollars per MB in Canada. Telus charges just 1.7 dollars, and that's considered ripping off. AT&T charges Thirty dollars per MB in the UK, whereas Vodafone charges between 1c and 2 dollars (depending on plan). I don't care if an AT&T representative is taking a personal flight to London for each customer, setting up their wireless network, getting a few too many pints outside the Tate Modern, and flying back, it shouldn't have a 10,000% markup.
Personally, I think that by law users should have to opt-in to these ridiculous international rates while being shown what competing costs in that territory are and how to contact those vendors. Rates like these are just abusing the system to make a buck (or 20 thousand).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus: who is in the best position to know the bill?
The telecom knows the exact bill at all times, but doesn't inform the customer. The customer may very well not know the bill at all (because of convoluted billing systems) until too late.
So the onus *should* be on the telecom to keep the customer informed of the bill. For example, my ISP usage is capped (Australia) so my ISP provides a usage meter so I can see exactly how much bandwidth I have used this month. Any time I want, I can check the meter to see i
Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevermind the whole "treat them like a 2 year old" nonsense.
How about being on the lookout for apparent fraud patterns?
See: my bank. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had calls from my bank's fraud department when they see a spike in, say, clothing purchases at department stores -- because I hardly EVER do that.
If they can call me because charges amounting to less than 10% of what flies in and out of my account roll through over a weekend -- not just because of how much, but because of /where/ -- AT&T sure as hell could flag an account that is fast approaching 50 times normal usage in the space of 24 hours.
Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
How does placing a cap in at, say, $500 worth of charges count as babysitting?
Who the hell actually WANTS to pay $500 worth of charges without knowing it?!
Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Insightful)
it's called a credit limit... they have those on credit cards for a long time and they are heavily policed for fraud. If a bank allowed this they'd be looking at massive SEC and banking fines for such reckless credit behavior.
Real responsibility is more than watch-out-for-#1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because everyone needs to be treated like a two year-old. No, we can't expect people to act like adults and be responsible for their own actions.
Real grown-up responsibility has more than a watch-out-for-yourself component. There's both an individual and a social component.
And a reasonably convincing case to be made that among others, most cell carriers don't take enough responsibility in helping people signing contracts understand the whole thing. Or that a reasonable person would find it highly surprising there are corners of the covered terms of service which if you wander into can subject you to fees 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than your conventional bill.
Think about it this way: when the people in question got the data service, do you really think they *never* asked what the service cost? It's highly unlikely. What is highly likely is that they asked, got the standard answer about the most common usage, and were simply not informed about the additional usage fees. They took an incomplete answer as a complete one.
You can argue that the contract is a complete answer, but here we have a problem: contracts are not intended to be effective vehicles for communicating terms of agreement to consumers, they're designed to be effective vehicles for specifying terms to the legal machinery. If you want to argue that the contract is the answer, you may as well argue the source code of a piece of software serves as a FAQ or Manual.
Re:Disgusted (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think giving someone notice once their monthly phone bill is approaching $1000 due to a handful of glorified roaming charges is "treating them like a two-year old".
Rational people aren't going to think that sending an email is going to cost them thousands of dollar just because they're out of the country. It's email, for crying out loud.
Imagine getting a receipt at a restaurant for thousands of dollars due to a few tea refills. If you're ordering some sort of special tea that costs that much, you'd expect someone to tell you, right? Would you accept it if they pointed to some fine print at the bottom of the back of the menu?
Now, from the article:
It looks like AT&T is going to be sensible about this. That's a good thing. Remember how people kill people, and sometimes themselves? Getting fine-printed into thousands of dollars of debt is one of the things that can cause that. They'll probably kick it down to something the family is actually able to pay without selling their house or draining their kids' college funds.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"Rednecks" are a
All too common tale (Score:5, Insightful)
This sort of thing has been going on for decades with cell phones and roaming. It is all too easy to get hosed by unexpected charges. They really should be forced to inform you anytime the fees on a call will exceed 10 times your normal per minute fee BEFORE connecting the call or in this case Internet connection.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:All too common tale (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. My gf just went to india, germany, and russia and texted and called me without tell AT&T anything.
This is another customer 'gotcha.'
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe when i looked these plans up a couple days ago (slashdot is a tad slow again) you have to add an '5GB north american data plan'
That 5GB is still US only however. The 'North American' portion is 100MB of data they add on. This ONLY costs $49 more than the 5GB US plan !! Almost twice as much to be able to send a few emails home. Pretty sad when stamps are cheaper than your email...Burn to CD and overnight your letter and photos home. How long to use up 100MB surfing slashdot i wonder...
10 to 1 says
Re:All too common tale (Score:4, Informative)
International roaming is a feature you have to call and add to the account, they make you aware of the fees, and try to sell you a package that will reduce themm and when you do not buy it, they note it.
That wasn't my experience with AT&T. I used them from 2001 to 2004. I live in the US, and I was able to freely use my cell phone in Canada, and accrue roaming charges, without having to call and authorize anything. I had one of their national plans, so I was never charged roaming charges in the US, Canada was a different story.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
this is the fun of our credit system. no need to actually be responsible as a vendor anymore, just give out horrible lines of credit to anyone, and when they walk away and cancel you simply report the infraction and remove any chance of this person buying something for the next 7 years.
Re:All too common tale (Score:5, Informative)
In the European Union, thanks to Commission intervention, mobile firms *have* to text you to inform you of rates whenever you arrive in a new state.
Too bad.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Too bad that our FCC does NOT require reasonable access and reasonable charges on OUR public airwaves.
Instead, the FCC whores out our frequencies for billions of dollars, and we then get re-charged for using those frequencies. What a crock of shit.
Question: How much did the roaming agreement with that "roaming carrier" cost AT&T? 10$? 100$? ... Free (peering agreement)?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed the frequencies are "owned" by the public. And we have elected our leaders and placed our trust in them to manage said airways in our best interests. So it's not a "load of crap" - it's what we have asked our elected officials to do. If you don't like how the system is run you have a
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
that's actually completely wrong. I just got back from 2 weeks in Mexico and my AT&T phone worked fine with my default plan. There is now a warning on their iPhone page about data roaming fees, but there's nothing that needs to be done to enable it.
No enabling needed - intl roaming in NA is *auto* (Score:3, Informative)
I must also chime in and say you're misinformed, at least for roaming within North America. I live on San Juan Island, WA [wikipedia.org], just across the Haro Strait from Victoria BC, and my cell phone often switches over to the BC Rogers cell across the water with no change in functionality -- and I have never called AT&T to "enable" any such roaming technology, it simply does it automatically. In fact, I have to be very cautious with my billing statements to make sure that AT&T isn't busy trying to slip a ton
AT&T's getting more clueful. (Score:4, Funny)
The iPhone, at least, has a "Disable Data Roaming" option... of course, they probably had that clue shoved down their throats by Apple. :)
Re:AT&T's getting more clueful. (Score:5, Informative)
The iPhone, at least, has a "Disable Data Roaming" option... of course, they probably had that clue shoved down their throats by Apple. :)
Ummm, no. The first iphone had international data roaming turned on by default. And since the iphone never really turns off, many suckers ran up large bills when traveling internationally since the iphone doesn't have push email and checks every 5 minutes or so, which results in a large data bill even if you don't send or receive a single email.
The second iphone has international data roaming disabled by default.
Both parties stupid? (Score:3, Informative)
The AirCard allows users to connect to e-mail, the Internet and business applications while traveling, according to AT&T's Web site. On the Terry family's bill, they were charged international fees for the service.
The Terry family said they asked an AT&T employee about the service before their son left the country. They said they were told nothing about international fees.
Did they even ask about international fees?
From the AT&T website about their plan.
So figure, $20k @ 1.5 cents a KB he transfered about a Gig. Looking at the video some of the sessions were a few hundred megs so I really can't find AT&T all that much at fault here that they didn't check the rates.
Unless.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Then at 0.15cents, it should be 10x what you said, or 10G... unless he was doing some heavy torrenting, I doubt that adds up. 1Gb itself is quite a bit of data for an aircard/evdo thing to do, as slow as they are. And with only 21 uses of it, thats a good bit of data: ~51Mb per session avg., which with normal speeds around 200k, ~25KB/s, would be 34Mins of constant full bandwidth usage per session, 12Hrs total, but probably 3-4x or more that time realistically.
Granted, I do not agr
Re:Both parties stupid? (Score:4, Informative)
Rate Plan Details
Included Data 5 GB
Additional data $0.00048/KB
Canadian Data $0.015/KB
International Data $0.0195/KB
That is probably what they are told.
BUT...
Read it closer
That 5GB is still US only. What is included is a whooping 100MB. For $49 dollars more than 5GB US plan. If they actually explain that do they still sell any?
I say the rep leaves out this little detail. Afterall i had a sprint rep flatout lie about a package he was selling me when i asked point blank.
And people wonder why my family doesn't go back. (Score:4, Interesting)
My family was one of the many caught up in the original AT&T / Cingular Merger, and promptly quit them after we found out we couldn't add my little brother onto our current (read: old AT&T) cell plan (which was $20 per phone per month) unless the entire family got whole new phones and went on a new two-year contract.
Well, we did... with T-mobile.
Fast forward to now and almost the entire family has upgraded their phones since -- only one person at a time as opposed to en masse -- and my sister and I are happy as clams with Sidekicks, and even when I traveled to Canada, it never got nuts like this. (In fact, the one thing my boyfriend likes about T-mobile is that when he was traipsing all over Europe, you couldn't swing a charge cable around without hitting a T-mobile tower, so be enjoyed as-good-as-home data service!)
So... yeah, not surprised.
Re:And people wonder why my family doesn't go back (Score:4, Informative)
(In fact, the one thing my boyfriend likes about T-mobile is that when he was traipsing all over Europe, you couldn't swing a charge cable around without hitting a T-mobile tower, so be enjoyed as-good-as-home data service!)
That might have something to do with the fact that T-Mobile is a European carrier, the mobile arm of Germany's Deutsche Telekom.
That's why prepaid plans are so crippled in US (Score:4, Interesting)
Pre-notify cost of call? (Score:3, Interesting)
When you buy a product from a bricks'n'mortar or online store you're told up-front how much it's going to cost before you get out your cash/credit card/PayPal password
But not with mobile phones, usually you're either told just after the call ends how much credit you have left on your pay-as-you-go account or at the end of the month when your contract bill arrives in the post.
unconscionable contracts are unenforceable (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't there a common law rule about contracts that "unconscionable" clauses are not enforceable? There is no way a sane person would agree to purchase services at these prices or anticipate this level of charges. It's like ordering "a bottle of red" at The Olive Garden and getting a rare 1940 barolo priced at $20,000.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I've been burned by a child on a phone plan not understanding the limits of an "unlimited" text messaging plan and running up a $500 bill. I ended up paying it because I didn't want to mount a full scale protest at the phone company headquarters, which is probably what it would take to remove the bill.
The fact is that phone companies make it WAY to easy to run up HUGE bills. It isn't like you have any choice - every company does it.
When you're about to do something to raise your bill by an order of ma
AT & T is really SBC, in management quality. (Score:4, Interesting)
Those interested in how that happened can watch Stephen Colbert explain in a 1 minute 14 second video: The New AT&T [google.com].
It seems to me ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here are some typical charges at $0.019/KB
1 email would cost about $0.02 to send or receive
1 web page would cost about $0.20 to display
1 3.2 megapixel picture would cost $6 to send
1 10 megapixel picture would cost $20 to send
1 minute of DV video would cost $5200 to send
In other words, express the charges in terms of something they can understand. I'm sure if this family was given a fee schedule like this they would have suggested that their son not send home the pictures.
Not sure about you, but.... (Score:3, Insightful)
If someone slapped me and my family with 200 pages of paper, no matter what is printed on them, I'd be filing assault charges.
This is the kind of thing that should be covered by a user's bill of rights. Fair play and fair thinking in business is something we all have a right to expect. We have lemon laws for cars, and consequently have the right to think we'll be treated fairly by telephone companies. That we often are not is evidence of cause for legal action.
We'll get there, and instances of stupidity like this will push the line in the sand. Think about it, my bank calls me to make sure I really want to spend money on my card if it is outside the norms of my usual activity. Why would phone companies not also do this? ..... exactly.
ATT cut me off at $1000 (Score:3, Interesting)
Last Xmas we went back to the UK to see family. We live in NYC. My wife has an iPhone and uses it religiously. She hit $1000 pretty easily in the UK, but at that point ATT sent us a text, and cut off the data service, leaving the voice service on.
That seemed a pretty sensible default to me.
Similarly, when I had a UK cell phone with Vodafone on vacation I've received messages asking me to call to confirm my high phone usage and charges when I hit 2-3 hundred pounds sterling (~$500 maybe).
I can't imagine why ATT didn't alert them in this case.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Abuse the rules? Umm the contract stipulated the charges, its not ATTs fault the customer ran up time and got an automated bill for 19 grand.
I doubt a human saw the bill as it was printed, packaged and mailed all automatically.
Sure its insanely excessive, but they did use the service fair and square. I also would be wiling to bet if they called ATT and rationally talked to them, the bill would go away.
Contracts are inadequate customer communication (Score:5, Insightful)
As I've said elsewhere in the thread, expecting contracts to serve as effective communication to the customer is like expecting source code of a program to serve as a FAQ or a manual.
Contracts are not really intended for (nor good at) effective communication of agreement terms to a customer. Especially when drafted entirely by the legal department of one side agreement, their purpose is something else entirely, which is to communicate those terms to the legal system (and, maximize the interests of the side that drafts them under the fullest extent possible under the law).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Abuse the rules? Umm the contract stipulated the charges, its not ATTs fault the customer ran up time and got an automated bill for 19 grand.
They advertised 'Stay connected whether you are traveling across town, the U.S., or the world' but hid deep in the contract that it'll cost you 100 times more. You have a strange definition of abuse if that doesn't qualify.
Re:Former ATT Employee, no sympathy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Former ATT Employee, no sympathy (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people, though, simply do not grok how much data a short video or a few dozen lightly compressed photos use up, though. It's not like voice, where everyone understands what a minute is. A few minutes on a data call can transfer just a few kilobytes, or possibly tens of megabytes - and most people who aren't IT people or telecommunications experts simply don't understand this.
It would be more customer-friendly to by default have the international roaming plan bar calls once the charges reach, say, $100 - instead of let people who aren't IT experts unexpectedly run up gigantic data bills.
That's before we get to the rip-off profiteering that is international roaming.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You can get unlimited plans but they cost more money. I think what you want is an unlimited everything, worldwide plan for $20. I would like bread to cost a dime. I do not see that happening.
I don't think that is what anyone is asking for. Reasonable charges is what I would be asking for. Let's say you have an iPhone with a contract in the USA and you take it to France. I'd say a _reasonable_ charge would be the same monthly charge as a French customer would have paid on top of your normal US charge. And an alert popping up before you start getting charged informing you of the situation and giving you the choice of accepting the fees or not using the phone. Or lets say I have a data plan costin