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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."
Bust the all the myths that the companies quote about why they need to charge what they do, reliability, and especially that there is competition in the marketplace?
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
It's not the fans.
You don't mess with people that blow stuff up for a living.
Even if they're nerds.
Dual Opteron < $600
anyone else think those companies are crooks for charging per kilobyte like that is complete bull s(*@# ? just loading a damn web page like cnn.com is almost 1MB so that would be 1$
No one should be held liable for outrageous bills like this. AT&T failed to put reasonable controls in their billing system so customers are alerted when there's an obvious technical error, unauthorized use, or a simple mistake. American Express says my credit line is unlimited, but if I try to spend $100k they will decline the purchase and contact me. If I had a history of paying $100k bills they may allow it. But AT&T allows an account that's never exceeded a few hundred dollars reach $11,000. We all know why, unlike American Express, AT&T doesn't incur $11,000 in expenses so they don't bother doing anything about it.
It doesn't make any sense to me. Most people are unable to pay the bill, and anyone that can afford it has the resources to fight them. Either way, it generates a lot of bad PR and very little revenue. I'm surprised Apple hasn't put more pressure on them, these stories are frequently reported as "man receives $10,000 iPhone bill."
This is why call centre scripts should never use symbols, like "$1.50", or in this case "$0.015". They should explicitly write out what the person will say, i.e., "one dollar fifty", or "one point five cents". This is because people are incredibly stupid/prone to fluffing things up under stress, especially in a dull repetitive job dealing with annoyed customers.
Anyway, 9 GB in a few hours eh? For casual web browsing? To get to 9 GB would require watching TEN HOURS of TWO MBIT video streams. I suspect YouTube is 500kbps so that's FORTY HOURS of YouTube. To consistently get two mbit on a 3G modem would be a miracle.