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Turned Off iPhone Gets $4800 Bill from AT&T
Tech.Luver writes "Jay Levy says he has been stung by Apple's iPhone pact with AT&T after he took an iPhone on a Mediterranean cruise.
They didn't use their phones, but when they got back they had a 54-page monthly bill of nearly $4,800 from AT&T Wireless.
The problem was that their three iPhones were racking up a bill for data charges using foreign phone charges. The iPhone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on. ""
Oh, dude's not alone. I'd much rather have hospital equipment designed such that it doesn't malfunction in the presence of a cell phone, than I would rely on the adroit and vigilant shepherding of electronic gadgets by worried family and friends who come to visit me in hospital. In this situation you fix the problem in the place where it's relatively easy to fix in a reliable way (i.e. by shielding the electronic gear from other signals at manufacturing time) rather in than in a zillion places (random heads of random unpredictable people) which are, every single one of them, prone to human error.
Since you seem so inclined, I suggest you instead thank the gods that these decisions are not up to you. The fact that other people make them might save your life one day.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You can't take the battery out, but you can take the SIM card out. This way, you can use it for Wi-Fi and calendar, without the fear of being billed.
Well, I don't know how different AT&T's billing is from Verizon's but we have about 10-15 users on Treos that have their e-mail pushed down from Exchange to them and that surf the Internet. I've seen our bills and they're only a few pages. Every e-mail that comes to them (some get 50+ a day easily) goes to their phone, yet we still don't have endless bills. The bill for our entire company's set of cell phones, wireless data cards for laptops and regular phone lines combined adds up to the same number of pages that some of these people have been getting for ONE phone. I'd be interested to know why iPhone / AT&T chose to go the route they did. It's obviously related either to the way iPhone does data transfers, the way AT&T tracks them, or both.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
In fact, I'm even told that if your phone rings for an incoming call, that's enough for you to get roaming charges (even if you don't answer it). Supposedly you can avoid that by forwarding incoming calls directly to voicemail.
BTW, you don't want to roam internationally, at least, not without an expense account.
I remember one year I took a week's vacation in Ireland, and took my GSM phone with me. One day I was walking back to the hotel and the phone rang -- one of our customers was calling me directly, rather than use our central tech support line. It's bad enough to take direct customer calls on your personal cell phone (because the customer hasn't updated their contact info). It's even worse when that happens while you're roaming internationally.
The upshot is that I answered reflexively, before I realized what the call was going to cost. I hung up immediately as soon as I made that realization--the call must have been less than a second or two. That was still good enough to bill for a complete call, rounded up to a minute of airtime.
That second or two of airtime cost me $3.00 on my bill.
No, they didn't buy me dinner first.
As stated elsewhere in the comments, it is configurable and the automatic e-mail check is off by default. These guys turned it on, went on holiday and forgot to turn it off, resulting in a big bill.
Seems like the real option that's needed is a 'don't make data calls on a foreign network' option.
...and to hell with those pesky laws of physics!Say you have an ECG machine. It's hooked up via sticky contact pads to your chest and is measuring the delicate flickerings of life in your body. It's doing this because it's trying to spot the *tiny* irregularities that could indicate Bad Things.
You can't magically design a machine that's picking up miniscule electrical currents like this and have it unaffected when some idiot brings in a portable radio transceiver and cranks it up nearby while they tell their wife what they want for dinner.
As I type, I'm within 30 feet of a ward full of such machines, and maybe a couple of hundred yards from the EEG devices that measure the brain's electrical activity. As we're testing today, I can wave my phone around and I can watch the interference it causes on the data being captured. Even when I'm not talking on the phone, it's checking in with the nearest base station periodically, and I can see that screwing the traces too. It's not causing those machines to break: but it's fvcking up the data that they're capturing - and that data is being captured as it's for diagnostic purposes. Screwing this up could have really bad consequences for someone.
First, no it's not rocket science, and it's not magic. It's a problem in electrical engineering.This is not rocket science.
Second, I have a different definition of "broken" than you do. By my definition a machine is "broken" when it does not accomplish the task it is designed for. In this case, a machine that is designed for data acquisition is broken when it reports null or spurious results when connected to the patient. So, if a cell phone causes null or spurious results, then the cell phone breaks the machine.
Third, the reality is that the cell phone WILL be in the environment. Whether by intention or by accident, the phone will be there on a fairly regular basis. Ether someone will forget the ban, forget they have the phone, or both, or someone asserts their "Rights" to their cell phone (however bogus those rights might be) or simple is selfish enough to think their convenience supersedes any "rules" a hospital puts in place.
And Finally, There are manufacturers who have already engineered around the problem with ECG's. Since it has been done, then it obviously can be done. I can point out a multiple examples of equipment that functions correctly around cellphones, some even require them to operate, like this machine that uses a cellphone to transmit ECG data, but it's one of those situations where someone is talking out of their butt without thinking it through, your limited experience does not translate into an impossibility. If you thought it through, you'd have realized that there are a number of data collecting medical devices out there that are used outside of the hospital, in particular I'm thinking of ECGS carried by EMT's or Paramedics, and the built in ECGs that are a part of the ADF equipment (some of which actually have a cell phone included in the cabinet designed to dial 911 when powered on.) They will, most assuredly, be in high-cell phone use environments (for example, at an accident scene with a number of onlookers using their phones to document and talk about the accident, as rubberneckers are wont to do)
Basically, If your machines are broken, then you need to change manufacturers. You are, as you pointed out, unnecessarily risking lives. If your place of business is in the US, considering the current litigious environment in the US, as it applies to health care, in particular. You are begging for a huge wrongful death, malpractice type lawsuit.
I don't agree that this is the way it should be, but it IS the way things are.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
There is no reason to believe that the Verizon billing system ever had this particular issue. However, if it did, its very likely that Verizon would have solved these problems a couple years ago when they started rolling our their EVDO network. At that time the early adopter EVDO customers were laptop users who did use the service to surf the web and send/receive email extensively. Of course, there is also no reason to suspect that the AT&T billing system had this issue.
Regarding bad press, I'd say there has been plenty of bad press about both of these iPhone issues. I was merely pondering why these issues only showed up with the iPhone, when in point of fact, AT&T have sold several million WIndows Mobile and other devices that, in theory, offer their users the same services. If those users had been, oh, routinely using the data access features to surf the web and so forth they would have seen 300 page bills and the problem would have been fixed ages ago. Clearly it wasn't. I find that interesting. I think we'll see a few more of these types of issues crop up as the iPhone population grows, but also as other new phones come on the market which make it easier for people to actually use these network services.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The bigger problem here involves insurance, not the devices themselves. Cell phones don't kill people in hospitals, or crash airplanes, or magically blow up at gas stations. But because we have a one-in-a-million chance of something happening, which under the worst of situations could hypothetically cause a death/crash/fire, we have insulting signs all over the place warning us to turn off the phone.
Apparently you missed this.
It's not nearly as rare as "one-in-a-million" - it's more like "one-in-one-point-two" (50 out of 61 cases tested), provided the network being used is GPRS-based. That's pretty damn significant. And these were life-threatening cases of interference, including ventilators being switched off and pacemakers running at the wrong rhythm.
Even if you're not using GPRS, it's not a hospital's job to go around testing different cell phone networks to see if they interfere with their equipment. Their job is to save lives, not test cell phone equipment. And to that end, I would certainly hope that they would require that all devices potentially able to disrupt hospital equipment to be switched off, regardless of whether or not you're "insulted" by the signs. Your personal feelings are not worth a hill of beans next to somebody's life.
It's the only possible scenario since when you actually power the phone off, it's completely off.
Unfortunately, that isn't true. Another possible scenario is that the users (if you follow the article links, quite a few people have now been had by this one) did something they thought would switch off their phones, but in fact didn't, and then they couldn't tell the difference. And as I've said throughout this discussion, the latter is a serious usability flaw, given the potential consequences of the mistake.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Of course, those of us using phones that get snarky about shutting down, like my Blackberry, usually can solve the problem by popping the battery. The "off" button on my 7130e is a sleep button that leaves the antenna powered and wakes automatically when there is a call. To save power overnight one has to turn off the antenna and then put the phone to sleep, or just pull the battery. On occasion, the antenna power down stalls and never completes. Failure to turn off the antenna results in a serious overnight drain on the battery many nights, so the battery being removable is an important feature to me.
Steve's insistence on non-removable batteries in the smaller electronics has kept me from considering those products. A multi-day denial of service to change batteries while Apple does the job for me and the inability to take spare batteries on the road or extend the life of an older battery as a spare is simply unacceptable.
As for the "new" AT&T, this is business as usual for them. I had a pager with Cellular One, which they transparently provisioned through SBC. Then, a couple of years later they stopped providing the pager service but didn't tell me until I brought the pager in to get it fixed because I wasn't getting my pages. They said that had to buy a new phone and sign a new, pricier contract if I wanted the features they'd dropped. So I passed and kept an eye out for a better deal. About two years after that, SBC started billing me for pager services that Cellular One, now Cingular, hadn't been providing me for quite awhile. When I called Cingular to get it straightened out, the supervisor I spoke to told me I was an idiot, in those words, for calling him and not SBC. I pointed out that it was Cingular that had lied to SBC while selling them closed accounts and he hung up. I had a new phone with a new provider 12 hours later, and will not be doing business with the "new" AT&T aka Cingular & SBC & the old AT&T & some others that I misplaced somewhere.
The phone was also useless outside the country because of roaming charges resembling college tuition bills, but I remembered 1990 when these same telcos sold 800 numbers for use as pay calling instead of free calling and the usual suspects circulated free prize announcements and other lures at the other end of 800 numbers that consumers expected would be toll free, and instead got stuck for the message fee "$1-10" per minute depending on the scam, as I recall. This continued long after the 900 series numbers for pay calls began.
So, Steve, to summarize, I need a removable battery and a phone company that knows its whatsits from a hole in the ground and hasn't made my list of pillage artists. Best of luck on that last one. Oh, and I'm watching whose security oddities verrrry closely as well and I don't care if a removeable battery costs me a little in thickness.
Free Adam Smith! (Or best offer.)