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AT&T's Bad Math Strikes MythBusters' Savage
etherlad writes "MythBusters' Adam Savage got a bill charging him $11,000 for 'a few hours' of Web surfing while in Canada, using his AT&T USB Mercury modem. AT&T gave him a quote on the data rate: '.015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb.' Looks like AT&T didn't learn from Verizon's inability to do math. AT&T is also claiming Savage downloaded over 9 GB, which he calls 'frakking impossible.' Savage's huge following on twitter got him a speedy response by AT&T."
Someone forgot to tell Verizon.
http://verizonmath.blogspot.com/ (blogspot.com)
It's long (27 minutes) and old, I know. Still worth a listen if you haven't heard it before. Also still funny if you have.
Given the way the math works out I'm going to say it's .015 cents per kilobit. AT&T claims he used 9 gigabytes. That is 9,663,676,416 bytes = 9,437,184 kilobytes* = 77,309,411.328 kilobits. At .015 cents per kilobit it comes out to $11,596.41. The summary claims he was charged $11,000.
* down with the kibi prefix!
I can't believe no on Slashdot has pointed out that .015 cents != a penny and a half
That's because that is suppose to be the obvious part, but isn't to surprisingly few people. That's the whole point.
The rate really is 1.5 cents per KB, but it is constantly quoted as .015 cents.. that is, the number is typed out in dollars (.015) but because everyone knows that a price in fractions of dollars is really talking about cents, that's the unit spoken by a lot of people when interpreting it. "Point zero one five cents." And they don't understand that they have changed the value.
It's not a matter of a haywire billing system, it a matter of false advertising by those who misquote it and to those who (gasp) interpret things literally - the ones who don't are just suckers.
I don't understand why data is so hugely expensive in the US anyway. In Europe, you get unlimited data plans starting at EU 5/month (EU 25/month for unlimited 3.5G usage). Or you can buy 3G access day-by-day for EU 2.50/day. Some plans have international data roaming caps anywhere within Europe at EU 15/day.
Only in the US do you have this insanity. I'm returning from a trip to Stockholm and you can get unlimited 7.2MB broadband for about 40 bucks a month including taxes. 25 if you already have a phone plan. My swedish is lacking, but poking around with google translator I didn't find anything about bandwidth caps.
Again: $25-40US for UNLIMITED 7.2Mb broadband. Including taxes.
Off the top of my head, not a single major WIRED provider in the US even matches that price ... and many are talking about implementing bandwidth caps. Wireless? Bah. No big provider is unlimited and you're coughing up at least $60 + taxes and good luck actually getting 7.2Mb.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
It's per kilobit, not byte. 9,437,184 * 8 * $0.00015 = 11,324.6208 ~ 11,000
Customer service Epic Fail. I find it interesting that people aren't mentioning that this is actually Cingular, AT&T cellular died years ago and was bought out by Cingular, who later re-branded as AT&T because they thought that had better name recognition. AT&T flubbed a CRM install and it tanked their customer service, and they died. It just happened that the two companies used the same cellular technology (GSM or whatever) and a merger was possible. Sadly, Cingular's customer service was really no better than AT&T's, so you're still dealing with a sad and lonely monster.
I use Alltel. Driving to work a week ago I got a text message saying that my account had high usage and I needed to call them. My wife had just spent a week on the other side of the country, her cell is an additional line on my plan. We spent a lot of hours playing WoW and talking while she was gone, and I didn't know she was roaming. $600 worth of charges. Alltel saw the problem, contacted me, and offered me a plan upgrade for $20 a month that gave me unlimited nation-wide roaming, and that by doing it, it would be retroactive and I wouldn't be hit with a $600 phone bill.
THAT is customer service. I don't know what AT&T provides, but it ain't customer service. Cellular service in the USA has always been hideously monopolistic compared to a lot of the world, and somehow they get away with it. Hopefully that will change some day, probably the same day that I can easily buy an iPhone from an Alltel store and not have to deal with AT&T.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.