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How To Rack Up $28,000 In Roaming Without Leaving the US
pmbasehore writes "While waiting for his cruise ship to depart, a man decided to use his AT&T wireless card and Slingbox account to watch the Bears vs. Lions football game. When he got his bill, he was slammed with $28,067.31 in 'International Roaming' charges, even though he never left American soil. The bill was finally dropped to $290.65, but only after the media got involved." He might have left the soil (the story says he was already aboard the ship), but shouldn't the dock count?
When I used to live 5 miles from the Canadian boarder I would hear nightmare stories like this all the time. People, despite being in the US would find that their cell was roaming to a Canadian tower because it had a better signal. It was bad then, even before data. Now I can only imagine how horrible it must be.
There's no way for your home provider to have a real time accounting of the calls that you make while roaming.
That's a bit of an overstatement. There are several ways of speeding up the information and if you use CAMEL it's possible for the home network to specify some limits in advance which gives full real time billing control. It would take a certain amount of effort, but it's not nearly impossible nowadays. How do you think prepaid subscribers get service when they go abroad? Do you think the phone company lets you rack up 28k Euro charges on your 30Euro prepaid SIM before doing reconciliation?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I wouldn't call it a poor design.
I certainly would. A cellphone should never choose a roaming cell over a local one.
The design is to connect to the tower with the best reception.
In the UK, early on in the development of digital cellphones, some users complained that their phones would pick up transmitters from France if they were near the coast (presumably the Calais transmitter was closer than the nearest one from their network).
As far as I know, this doesn't happen now. A phone won't chose a transmitter from abroad over a local one.
Which is ridiculous. The roaming provider can stream slingbox to a user but they can't keep usage data up to date in near real-time? No such cap exists because it's more profitable to fuck over people than to implement it.
"The design is to connect to the tower with the best reception"
But as this story points out, there are factors other than "best reception" than can weigh into which tower is best to connect to. Looking at only one factor in a multi-dimensional problem is a poor design.
In a good design, the phone would connect to a "home network" tower with "acceptable" reception before even looking at an "international roaming / if you have to ask you can't afford it" tower.
I had the same battle with my provider (Rogers in Canada). Because I'm "tethering" (connecting a Nokia N770 tablet with BlueTooth to my KRZR phone) the "best" data package I can get is $10 for 10 MB, nothing bigger. However if I go over those 10MB, they charge me 3 cts per kB. Which means that the second 10MB will cost me $300.
BTW, my first night of surfing a little to maps.google (just 20 mins, nothing more) did indeed cost me $75.
But the kicker is that I can't get a bigger package, Rogers is not able or willing to put a 10MB cap on it and finally -- this is the worst part -- I can't get an status report to check how much of my quota I've used up.
This is not just rediculous, but simply "providers screwing there customers, because they can".
Browsers shouldn't have a back button!! It's all about going forward...