Buy an iPhone, get $5000 in roaming charges!

[thewayne]

Last month, someone got socked with a $3000 phone bill when they went to Europe. This month, a graphics designer goes to the UK and gets hit for $5K. Here's the beauty: AT&T charges you $2 per MEGABYTE of data transfer! A web page accessed by the iJunk can easily cost you more than $20!

Yeah, I want an iPhone.

Oh, and apparently the bill itself is HUGE: I've heard of bills being more than 100 pages -- and that's double-sided printing! Every time you access data, it's a non-detailed data access line on your bill, even if the data transfer is covered by your contract and there's no charge associated with it.

http://www.arcdesignconsulting.com/iphone_horror.html

Comments

[silveradept]

That's underhanded. No confirmation, no inquiry, no user requirement to turn on the features internationally because everyone knows they're expensive. That's probably perfectly legal, but ethically that's utterly wrong.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Excuse me, Big Business here! What is this 'ethics' of which you speak?

[silveradept]

Precisely. A company with no concept of the word cannot be expected to be able to behave in that manner. At the very least, a warning with an explanation of what the charges are going to be like should happen.

[ateji.livejournal.com]

Oh, yay, another one. >_<

Nope, don't want an iPhone. If I go abroad, I'm renting or outright getting a contract if it's long enough.

(Do you remember the ker-fluffle a few months back on Consumerist about one of the cell phone providers seeing no difference between 0.01 and 0.001?)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Oh, my! No, I didn't see that! That's what you get when you have executives with no sense of reality or economics. "But we can manage a business! And we have good hair!"

On a related note, once upon a time a tourist, American, IIRC, was arrested at an airport in Germany for plugging his laptop into the wall to charge it. He was going to be charged with theft of utilities. The cops didn't understand that the amount stolen was much less than a penny.

[ateji.livejournal.com]

I suppose now they'd want to charge a euro to do it. :P

[fastlearner.livejournal.com]

Here's the beauty: AT&T charges you $2 per MEGABYTE of data transfer! A web page accessed by the iJunk can easily cost you more than $20!

Hrm... maybe a YouTube page or something. Most web pages are significantly less than a megabyte.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Depending on the graphics density, absolutely. I think the quote was more in reference to working on a site, requiring access to multiple pages.

I would also question if that is a cumulative per megabyte charge or is it a per page accessed charge? The former would make more sense, the latter would make more sense for a rapacious company. :P