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FCC Will Tackle Cell Phone 'Bill Shock'
MexiCali59 writes "The FCC is expected to launch a proceeding at its Thursday meeting that could force wireless providers to change their billing practices. The agency wants to prevent consumers from unknowingly racking up oversized bills on their phones when they go over their minutes, a situation the agency calls 'bill shock.' The agency released a survey earlier this year that showed one in six American consumers had been surprised by a cell phone bill. The FCC's proposed rules would require carriers to send text or voice alerts before and when minutes are used up. Notifications would also have to accompany out-of-country charges, and carriers would be required to clearly disclose any tools they offer to simplify billing."
People could pay attention to the fact that they send 500 text messages in a single day.
The world is how you make it
Can the government also mandate that someone text me when I've eaten too much or when I spend too much money at a bar?
I was forced to switch from one of Sprint's discontinued "Family Plans" to an everything plan in order to get a modern phone a few years ago, and now that I've got an even nicer phone that sucks down more data, I wouldn't be surprised if they discontinue this plan too. Maybe the FCC can keep things semi reasonable, instead of letting things get even worse.
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This is such a simple great idea - send a text you've reached your monthly plan limit. No more guessing or having to check.
So are people becoming so lazy that they can't be bothered to check their used minutes, so they need the government to make sure they aren't surprised?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Maybe I am missing something, but why doesn't the FCC go after the roots of some of these problems. For instance, can someone please explain to me why in the hell we are being charged for text messages in the first place? I mean, other than to screw us over and make a pretty penny?
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Have all cell phone bills max out at $500.00 PERIOD.
If you are dumb enough to go to that limit, so be it, but at least you KNOW what your maximum bill will be.
Then, you can text with reckless abandon!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
And if you are traveling internationally, they will charge you international rates to receive that message.
Although that is a small price to pay. Knowing that you racked up $1,000 in charges the first day instead of $7,000 after you get back. But you know someone will complain about that $0.20 message.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
These days it is not uncommon to have multiple phones tied to a single account that share minutes. There are husbands, wives, children etc that all share a plan and minutes. Does everyone have to continuously check minutes every time they go to make a phone call to see if everyone else has been using minutes or would it not be simpler on the whole to have the carrier who is tracking that time already down to the second send me a quick notification.
I've had to do this with each of verizon, at&t, and tmobile on one occasion.
Just say you don't want to pay. Say it in person, imply you are going to jump carriers if they do not fix it. Go by during lunch or on a weekend when their store is busiest, and complain loudly enough that the other customers are going to watch them deal with your issue.
They will fix it for you, and they will be very polite and apologetic about the situation to avoid losing potential customers. I have had friends use this technique as well, and so far our attempts have a 100% success rate.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I found one of the better solutions to "Bill Shock". Prepaid phone with unlimited minutes. My bill is my bill, and I can plan for that amount with no confusion.
I was screwed twice by cell phone companies who were out to screw their customers. The first time, I was overcharged $300/mo for "roaming" in a city 100 miles away, even though I never left my city limits during the entire period in question.
The second time, several years later, my phone didn't even work at a house I moved to. I left it sitting on my desk until the battery died, but I still paid the bill normally. Then I started getting overcharged $300 for "roaming". They couldn't demonstrate any calls, or even show any minutes used. I asked them to clarify how I could be roaming if the phone was dead. They couldn't give me any answer but "you need to pay..." But when the phone was working, they were kind enough to nail me with all kinds of fees for International use. Hop over the border, or even be close to it, and they can hit you for it.
Nope, I'm done with that nonsense. No more calls if I'm a day late (and every day after that for months). If my phone gets shut off, it's because I didn't pay the normal fixed amount, and they leave me alone. I *still* get calls 5 years later about a phone I bought as a gift for someone, and my name isn't suppose to even be on the account. No, I'm not paying their phone bill, because it's not my account dammit.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Ideally, the screen would tell you, at all times, the number of minutes you have left on your plan. When you're on a call, this number will count down.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I don't know if the solution to screwing customers out of their money is to force them to spend even more money as "screwing insurance". Why would it be so hard to make going over an "opt-in" instead of the default? Most major carriers won't even give you the option not to go over.
The problem isn't that people sometimes go over, it is that they are charged a ridiculous amount more when they do. I have a USB 3G Modem with a 5 Gig limit which I watched quite carefully. When I knowingly went over just a few hundred megabytes my bill went from $50.00 to $750.00. Now luckily, I was able to convince an upper level rep that I could have rooted my phone and tethered it, but I chose to get the 3G stick to be fair and make sure they received a reasonable amount of compensation for services provided. Until I laid this on them they absolutely were not going to budge at all. I am very much the exception, as obviously the average customer doesn't even understand what I just wrote, so they would have been just straight screwed.
This is of course ridiculous. Now I admit that I could have perused my contract more fully, but my provider has always been quite reasonable so - having a 7 year relationship with them - I trusted that my contract would also be reasonable. Also, bear in mind that most people don't grok the difference between 5 gigabytes and 300 Megabytes, so the whole "people should pay attention to the contract" argument is flatly absurd.
The bottom line? There should definately be a law against charging multiple orders of magnitude more for overages. There is absolutely no reason why they cannot pro-rate the overage at a reasonable increase (say 50%) and they absolutely count on peoples ignorance to jerk them around.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
In the geek spirit I would like to be able to configure it. I don't think the phone should ever just stop working completely but it would be nice to configure notification points, max overcharge, notification on excessive usage or abnormal high rates (out of country or whatever), etc. For most people it would just default to something sane, maybe with a simple wizard with a couple default setups, and a "power" mode that lets more advanced users do more detailed configuration. There is really no reason why we shouldn't have stuff like that. Hell, somebody could start a new cell phone company that supported such modern features and probably do pretty well (would have to stay ahead of the curve though because as soon as you captured a large chunk of the market the big guys would start copying the features).
because anything under $500 is small change...
We don't want the government to decide what they can and can't charge. We just want the government to require going over to be something you have to consciously opt in to do.
My carrier won't do it. I asked them if I could block data if I have no data plan, seeing as how they made the default internet button right in the center of my phone (and it sticks out the most). They said no. I suspect most other peoples' carriers won't, either.
So that would be an unlimited plan, priced at $500, right?
Overpriced. Every carrier will sell you an unlimited plan for less.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Would be to require carriers who offer more than one plan to do this work for the consumers. There's no justification for playing "gotcha" every month with every consumer. Why is it your responsibility to figure out someone else's convoluted sales system? Why do we allow companies to design contracts to trip up, confuse, and overcharge consumers?
Write a law that requires all carriers, who offer more than one plan or option for phone service, to calculate your bill as it would be under each of those plans, and bill each consumer the lowest amount among those plans.
The first comment is, to me, the most interesting response:
Sounds like we're once again legislating to save irresponsible people from their own self-destructive actions.
This response is a dramatic oversimplification of what's going on (sadly, a common occurance). What I believe the FCC is proposing is ensuring that _reasonable_ and _prudent_ laypeople can clearly understand the cost consequences of their actions. And, allowing a customer to set a reasonable price cap on their cell phone spending _increases_ accountability--for costs that match their spending ability.
For example, the cost of your garden variety LOL or ROFL missive sent via text message while roaming in Cancun (phone from Sprint [USA]) was about $1. For some, this can become frighteningly expensive. Given that European pay-as-you-go service carefully tracks (and easily reports to the user via a simple text message) their remaining credits, I fail to see why this reasonable ability isn't available to everyone.
And, as someone who has done disaster relief, I have been surprised by a few increases of $40-50 for roaming charges. I am willing to pay this--but I also desire the ability to know up front. I don't think the end user should have to carry their carrier's Terms and Conditions and rate sheet in their back pocket.
Also, some of these cell phone contracts are ludicrous: even the better ones (I like AT&T) don't do a great job clearly delineating between different types of service (for example, my unlimited SMS messaging plan doesn't include picture messaging). If I, as a person who reads contracts as a part of their job, can accidentally miss this, this circumstance doesn't bode well for an average person who doesn't do this.
Accountability requires reasonable rules and transparency--US cell contracts and bills need some help on this front.
Top-up reminders are something that the prepaid carriers have been doing for years.
It's insane that cell phone companies are effectively giving people $10,000 lines of credit (I've heard of cases where international roaming charges racked up that much in a month). At the very least, there should be an option to specify a maximum amount, where service is turned off if it goes over that amount, and I have to confirm that I want to continue service and understand how much it's going to cost to go over that amount. This would handle the vast majority of cases where people go way over because of international roaming charges, bandwidth overages, sending thousands of texts, etc.
I was looking for this post because I wanted to make it. :)
I was thinking that a mandatory user-definable bill-cap would a good way to go with this. The default would be set at, oh, 50% more than your no-extra-charges bill. You would have the option of raising your cap permanently or temporarily.
Your phone would just say "You have reached your pre-set spending limit. You must raise this limit before any further additional fee services will be available from this phone."
How hard is that?
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
How about you do something about the god damned HIDDEN CHARGES.
I'm not talking about overage minutes or text...those are clearly stated in my agreement and I'm on the hook for overages. I'm a big boy and I can pay the bills I agree to.
But SOMEHOW my cell phone bills seem to include over 20% in taxes, fees, surcharges...all that I never agreed to, was never informed of, and are not optional. How about that? How about when advertising service plan rates the cell companies be required to also report how much the government is going to tack on top of it too.
this happened to me on land lines. Being a kid, I knew that I needed to use an area code to call long distance. So I figured that any number that was in my area code was not long distance. So I set about dialing every BBS in my area code. Oops.
Turns out, and I still don't understand why, that quite a few of the numbers I called were not considered local. How was I supposed to know? My dad ended up getting a bill for a couple hundred dollars.
Personally, I don't think the phone company should be allowed to charge anything without an explicit declaration of price and agreement on the part of the customer. Even on POTS. When I dial a number, *any number*, I want to be quoted a rate and given a chance to decline.
These days I just have all long distance calls from my home phone blocked. If I need to make a long distance call, I have a phone card which has a fixed rate per minute, and it tells me how many much time I have left for a call. It's simple math to get back to the per minute rate. Why can't cell phones be as convenient?
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AT&T is willing to turn off data on a phone if you ask. Unfortunately it disables MMS as well, though you can still get SMS.
Gone!
Sprint is the worst. I had a 3G modem with unlimited north america plan+SERO which i used to roam in canada. $75/mo, 5 gigs. i typically used 3 gigs. until 2.5 years later when i received a bill for $3000. and the next month when i got another bill for $5000. for roaming in canada. and consuming 3 gigs data. evidently they just wanted me off the service -- i took the hint and dropped sprint without paying. they later "fixed" the bill and charged me $150 for those two months. i refused to pay that too and they dropped it completely. assholes.
In other news, the government is making credit card companies notify you when they invoke the fine print in the contract you signed, forcing people to pay for health insurance even if they think they "never get sick", and charging a fine for leaving your own car unlocked.
Getting e-mail on a phone ordinarily requires a data plan, which in the United States adds $720 to the cost of service over the course of a 24-month contract. Most prepaid phones in the United States tend to be dumbphones that can't do much more than talk and text and possibly shoot photos.
The main times I've had "bill shock" is times when I had my phone in my pocket, it got unlocked somehow or another, and the button to open up the web browser got accidentally pressed. Then I start racking up data charges without knowing.
Don't subscription services with overage charges make a bulk of their money off the overages? Blockbuster's main source of revenue was late movies. If we take this away from the cell phone companies, they'll likely just raise their rates all around for everyone.
iPhone: Free!
iPhone monthly charge: $200
iPhone minute reminder fee: $5
iPhone text reminder fee: $5
iPhone data reminder fee: $5
Every carrier will sell you an unlimited plan for less [than 500 USD].
Does this include unlimited international roaming?
imply you are going to jump carriers if they do not fix it
That works when the overage is less than the $350 to cancel your service.
I have a USB 3G Modem with a 5 Gig limit which I watched quite carefully. When I knowingly went over just a few hundred megabytes my bill went from $50.00 to $750.00.
As much as I hate Vodafone UK for their quality and practices, at least they got this part right: prepay. When you go over, it just stops sending you data, and everyone is happy.
Last week called, the want your comment back.
to include all fees, taxes, service charges, ect fucking ect, into the advertised price. a $40 plan with $30 a month in fees needs to die.
If we could get polling in targeted populations more accurate, we could use them as metrics for sunsetting legislation. If below 1/3 of the people directly served by a programme are not measured satisfied by the sunset review deadline (eg. 2 years, or 4 years, or the last day of a fiscal year 3 years from passage, etc), the law rescinds itself. Require 1 hour of debate at the review deadline, no matter how many people are satisfied. Really popular programmes won't be sunsetted.
A case like cell phone dissatisfaction is a good law to sunset like this. Just asking the same question: "Are you satisfied with your mobile phone service?" every year in a poll, and making the poll at the deadline count, would force mobile phone corps to satsify the market, or rules designed to do so would go into effect, setting ahead the sunset deadline. When it comes, if the programme isn't seeing even 1/3 of its people satisfied, it would end.
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I worked for a company that sold GPS devices that reported their location via cellular. One customer needed to transmit GPS coordinates (ie a 150-byte packet at most) every minute, so he got a really cheap plan from Verizon, a few megabytes for 30$/month.
During setup, he misconfigured it to report every second, so his first month he ended up using something like 500MB. Instead of cutting him off once he was far beyond his limit, or moving him to a more reasonable plan automatically, Verizon actually sent him a 30 000 dollar bill, for half a gig! They wouldn't budge at all, it took him getting a lawyer and threatening to sue for them to let him off this one time.
The fact that this sort of thing can happen is proof that the FCC is completely powerless or unwilling to stop consumer abuse.
I'll do one better - how about we let the consumer pick the max amount? Oh, and the consumer has to have the option of making that any number mentioned in an advertisement (so the service provider pays all the taxes if they neglected to include those in the ad).
I'd like my max to be the amount to be the amount in the ad. I get n minutes per month. I'm fine with them cutting me off mid-call when I hit n+1 (except for 911 calls), but I don't want to pay a dime more than I agreed to.
There is NO reason that we can't have this by law. Heck - they mandated that carriers be able to locate any phone within a few hundred feet for 911 service - why can't they have straightforward billing?
What's important to keep in mind is that the FCC is trying to up its regulatory power. This move could open them up to further regulation of the cell phone companies, something the FCC has been looking after for a while.
Why are the cell phone companies extending customers a near-infinite line of credit on the phone? What exactly makes them think that people are going to PAY a thousand dollar phone bill. It's sheer stupidity, they're sending out ludicrous bills and hoping to make it up on the suckers.
When I signed up for my Sprint plan, they did a credit check and capped my spending at $250. How hard is that? And how hard would it be to ask to have your plan capped to a certain multiple of your usual bill (say, 2x)?
Cell phone companies do NOT operate in a free market. The spectrum rights they are granted amount to legally authorized monopolies. Also, the vast array of towers a company needs in order to have reasonably broad coverage means that not only do cell phone companies have a legal monopoly, their market niche is also a natural monopoly.
Monopolies are one of the common reasons for capitalism/the market failing. The only way we know to patch this hole in our economic system is to have the government make rules and enforce them.
Anyhow, for this reason, in order to stop the cell phone companies legally scamming us by charging us ridiculous rates for overages and not telling us until the end of the month, they need to mandate notifications when our bill goes over.
I think notifications aren't enough : I think a user should be able to set a maximum dollar cap for a month of service, and if the bill goes over that the cell phone company must either get the user to agree to lift the cap or to cut off service until the end of the month. (except for emergency calls or calls on night/weekend minutes, etc)
I could understand advertising $39.95/mo exclusive of taxes, but the phone companies themselves tack on a bunch of other surcharges that are _not_ taxes. They make them sound like taxes by calling them "regulatory recovery fees", but they're really unadvertised price hikes that they can spring on you at will, even when you have a contractual price.
Make phone companies advertise their ACTUAL rate first. Then go after these warnings...
(It's for this reason I use a prepaid Tracfone; no surprises.)
The FCC's proposed rules would require carriers to send text or voice alerts before and when minutes are used up.
That way you can use up more minutes listening to the alert, which they will charge you for, but not without sending another alert to tell you about the minutes used up by the last alert so that you won’t be surprised when you get your bill and notice that they charged you $5000 for the thousands of alerts that you got.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
The ability to comprehend the difference between $0.001 and 0.001 ?
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
So that would be an unlimited plan, priced at $500, right?
No, that would be “your normal plan, plus extra charges for exceeding your contract which will never cause your total bill to go over $500, at which point we’ll disconnect your service until the billing cycle resets.”
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
In my experience, they can block it. They will tell you they can't, but they can. You might have to call back a few times. You might have to threaten to cancel, or get a supervisor, but they can block it.
Have you noticed that most of the cheaper non-smart phones have a prominent button for "marketplace" or some such WAP service? Just hitting it accidentally can double your bill if you don't have a data plan. (And if you have a cheap flipper, you probably don't have or need a data plan.) This button is usually the only one that can not be remapped or disabled. It is essentially a "PROFIT" button for the carrier.
We bought the unlimited data plan and unlimited texting plan for our daughter's first cell phone on the theory that just one mistake could be many times more expensive than the cost of the plan. We went a long time without surprises, and then one day I got a bill that was an appreciable fraction of a grand. Turns out the carrier had some kind of "ask a question via text" feature, daughter had discovered it, and was using it to help with homework. Had I known, I would have researched it, found how much it cost per question, and shut it down. But the billing cycle is such that you don't know you're in trouble until you're in LOTS of trouble, and I'm certain this is intentional also.
I argued with the carrier for a very long time, going up the chain of command (or just sideways -- you never can tell) and eventually found someone who cared that I was going to take four phones to a competing carrier unless they addressed this. They offered a 50% reduction in the bill and I gritted my teeth and took it. And also made very sure that I was aware of all such "services" and had them all locked out.
The great rank and file -- whom I like to call "Fred and Ethyl", would not know about this stuff until they're nailed by it. Even people who are being careful -- my case -- can still get nailed by "services" of which they are unaware. This goes way beyond disallowing Google Maps on a smartphone so you can charge someone ten bucks a month for the carrier's app. This is like buying a car with Onstar built in and then finding out that it's free to call a red and white ambulance but there's a $10,000 charge if the ambulance is blue and white. It's an arbitrary "gotcha" designed to generate windfalls for the carrier.
To a certain extent, they all do it, but some are worse than others.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
mine does. i refuse to pay for it. they won't even allow my browser to connect.
ok, what does "rooting your phoen and tethering it mean" in your context of a 3g usb modem?
I can call a special number that immediately texts me usage statistics for my plan. Also, every time I've gone international, as soon as I connect to a foreign carrier ATT sends me a text informing me of the current Intl rates. I don't know if they send an automatic message warning that you're reaching a limit (I have unlimited everything), they at least provide me a simple, easy method for checking.
When I knowingly went over just a few hundred megabytes my bill went from $50.00 to $750.00.
Anyone defending the practice must also figure out a way to defend bills like this.
I'd have no issue with them if the penalty for going over your 5gig limit was the cost of another 5 gig contract, but as you said, a few megabytes over and you were charged for the equivalent of an additional 14 contracts for an overage which is a fraction of a single contract.
If your bill were $100 due to that overage, I could still slighly understand the complaint (as $50 for a few megs is still a lot) but it would at least be in the same ballpark of cost and not the next continent.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I was on a Vodaphone data plan while living in Germay.
The man said we had the "all of Europe" plan.
Apparently the UK is not part of Europe. They were kind enough to cut us off at about $5,000 after four days.
We played the "dumb American" excuse card and manages something more reasonable, thankfully.
I told this to a colleage and he had a similar problem in Dubai, but he ended up paying it.
International roaming can quickly become crazy expensive.
In general I advocate a "bounce you to the next level" system with some minor penalty if you go over your minutes. On data, they really need a much better way of letting you know what is going on. The Vodaphone system had a software meter to count usage, but it was useless if you used the device with multiple laptops.
Why does the FCC need to enact rules to prevent people from doing DUMB things? If I go over my minutes, I should pay for them. How is it that hard to understand? The carriers give you a way (sometimes free) to check your minutes, via your account webpage, or sending text messages. People need to start taking responsibility for themselves.
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." Mark Twain.
and that you pay for incoming txt and over sea calls.
As well background data on the iphone / smart phones when you are roaming.
also in the Detroit area you can be Roaming to in Canada while still on the us side and end up paying big time.
Hi, I’m from last week and I came here just to say no, we don’t.
Just what we need, more gov't intrusion, they should let the free market take care of this.
Dave
Warning- if you just got pissed-off, you may be sarcasm-impaired
Now luckily, I was able to convince an upper level rep that I could have rooted my phone and tethered it, but I chose to get the 3G stick to be fair and make sure they received a reasonable amount of compensation for services provided. Until I laid this on them they absolutely were not going to budge at all. I am very much the exception, as obviously the average customer doesn't even understand what I just wrote, so they would have been just straight screwed.
A buddy of mine actually went and paid the extra 50 dollars (per month) for the "unlimitted data plan" on his phone - based on the assumption that worst case scenario, when his laptop doesn't have Wifi, he can tether it to get internet access. At work we have an out-dated system that we're trying to replace where IS Requests come in via outlook form emails. Most phones aren't capable of displaying the actual outlook form, you need to have the actual full version of outlook that comes with Office, not the web services or outlook express or anything like that. Some people just send in straight emails and don't use the forms. Which means for the most part - we'll know whats going on by either a readable email, or the subject that comes in on an outlook form. But theres the odd occaisons where it's needed.
My buddy goes and tethers to get his laptop to open the outlook forms - something he wouldn't have to have done if Windows Mobile was even a proper shoehorn for Windows products. He gets somewhere around 10 megs of traffic total, his bill jumped up by 300 dollars. Even without going over his limit, tethering was apparently not allowed - and wasn't covered in the data plan.
He argued to get them to drop the charges to something like 45 bucks, but it's still highway robbery. He didn't cause any more network stress on their end than what he had paid for, which was already the premium service, and they STILL took any chance they could get to nickel and dime him. I am sadly still under contract with this same provider, I'll be switching in Decemebr when its over.
It means he has two devices a phone and a 3G data stick, not a 3g usb modem phoen.
Agreed 100%
Pre-Pay is The Way. Hell, my phone tells me how many minutes I have left, and this feature was enabled by default.
The mind-set of a pre-pay service is to tell the customer how many minutes they have left in order to induce them into buying more minutes, sooner. The last thing the pre-pay company wants is for you to run out of minutes, because when that happens you have to make the call on a different phone and thus they wont be making any money from you until you get around to paying for more time.
The mind-set of these other plans is to never willingly tell the customer how many minutes they have left, and then jump for joy as soon as your minutes are up.
"His name was James Damore."
I honestly have a hard time seeing how anyone can be surprised by their bill, outright of a blatant mistake on the part of the carrier. I don't track my calls and text messaging meticulously but I do have a general sense of my load. If I happen to overdo it one month with text messages I'm not surprised when the bill comes and I owe a bit more than usual.
The fundamental problem I have is that carriers love to obfuscate everything. They advertise one price, then once you get sorting through all the charges tacked on top you're greeted to a substantially higher enough. The solution is simple. Prohibit companies from advertising prices that don't include taxes and other assorted fees. And in clear language and large type list what overages are going to cost. Actually, the practice of obfuscation should be banned across the board for all companies, because the problem doesn't only exist with mobile phone companies.
That way you don't need to complicate the matter with obnoxious reminders. Everything was stated clearly when you signed up. If you can't be bothered to read it's your own damn fault.
I honestly don't see how this will truly help. Most of those irresponsible enough to constantly run overcharges will likely continue to do so even with the reminders. They'll get the reminder and ignore it, deciding that they can deal with the extra little they're going to pay. Except that they'll just probably just keep doing this and end up right back where they started, with substantial overcharges.
One thing I'd like to see done is eliminating charges for text messages. It's outrageous what we're being charged for something that costs the carriers virtually nothing.
This is not a "protect people from themselves" issue. Things are purposely set up to maximize the possibility of you unintentionally racking up charges. A "Web" button that can't be disabled right next to the "Call" button. Smartphones that "phone home" over the data line even when data is disabled while traveling internationally. Huge, punishing charges if you go over your limit even by a tiny bit. (I mean seriously, if $40 a month will cover several gigabytes of downloads, why charge over $80 for 2.2 Megabytes of downloads without a data plan? Answer: Because they can.) Phone bills that lag 45 days or more behind your actual usage. "Services" that have a per-usage charge that isn't spelled out when you use them. (Teens typically fall for this.) The carrier not clearly communicating that you can turn a lot (but not all) of these "services" off by a simple request.
It's not just a matter of reading and understanding the TOS. We're all professionals here, we can really dig into a TOS and find the line buried on page 3 in the middle of paragraph six dealing with FCC regulations where they've buried the over usage fees. That doesn't cover everything -- there's ways to overinflate your bill that aren't covered by the TOS.
Mind you, my nephew was a fine counterexample. He was told that local calls on the weekends were free, and he thought he heard that all local calls were free. His first bill was the size of a paperback and well over a grand. To my knowledge the carrier is still looking for him. No matter how foolproof one makes a system, fools will find a way to crash land. But besides that, the system as it currently stands is designed to blow your hand off if you turn the knob to the left instead of the right, and that's the part that really needs to stop.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Hi, I'm from 2012, and AAAAAAAAAH!
Well then. just send out a message when they are close to the limit? They can still go over, or they can't contact the person. Not that it matters because you will be billed for all the minutes for the billing cycle. So if are are near your limit after 15 days, you can't pay it and then not get extra charges for the remaining 15 days.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is what I want! I wish they would do something like this with my bank account too. It would be nice if it were impossible to have a negative amount of money in my account.
A unique way to learn a language: http://languageloom.com
As I said in my post above, I don't think the phone should stop working because you hit the limit. You can bet the one time you need it the most it won't work because it's at the limit.
Better would be a warning message plus an audible beep or something during phone calls (sort of like call waiting). The phone should not stop working because there are certain times when that could be disastrous.
Be careful. Caps don't always work the way you want them to.
It used to be that payday loans could have basically unlimited interest rates. Companies competed on interest rates, so rates were 150-600%. (rates are examples) Then the state AGs got involved and lawmakers made laws and capped the interest rates at 250%.
Thanks to those laws, companies all have their interest rates at about 250%, because it's the cap. If they are under it, they can't be sued for usury. If they go farther under it, they'll lose money. So everyone stays right at it to maximize their profit and not start a price war.
It used to be you could (depending on your credit/payday loan history) get a loan for 150%. Thanks to the 'cap' to prevent these problems, the minimum is now 250%. The cap helped a few people, and hurt a lot.
If we make such a law, that may only encourage phone companies to make it easier to hit that $500 cap when you exceed your plan. After all, you don't need to worry, because your bill will never be $2000, so it's not a bad thing.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Here's one proposal:
1) Carriers must send out a notification and receive acknowledgement when 80% of a item in a plan is reached (each is treated separately, so 80% of texts, 80% of voice minutes, 80% of data bytes, etc). Ditto at 90% and just before the limit is reached.
2) Carriers must notify when the plan limit is reached *AND* inform customer of cost of going over that item in plan (e.g., additional voice minutes are $0.20/minute, etc.)
3) Carriers must notify on roaming what roaming rates are for various services
4) Carriers must allow customer to set user-specified hard limit to cost when going over, with appropriate notifications when 80%, 90% and hard limits are reached. (Hard limit may be set at $0, meaning you cannot go over)
5) Carriers must inform customer at time of purchase of hard limit is available, and get customer approval if the hard limit option is declined. This approval must be separate from other documents the customer signs and sees (i.e., you cannot have a plan of "you cannot have a hard limit"). If customer doesn't decline but for some reason doesn't set a hard limit, it will be set at 2x monthly plan cost (e.g., if your plan is $50/month, your hard limit is $100).
I will allow carriers to upsell customers during any notification.
You basically want to balance the carrier's want of making money, with the customer's need to not get outrageous bills. I ask for acknowledgement to ensure the customer cannot claim they did not receive the notification. Customers that feel ultra-responsible can decline hard limits which gives explicit proof that customer knows what they're getting into. It's also said during the initial purchase so carriers cannot simply omit the hard limit, and if they do, it's 2x the plan amount.
Carriers seem to think that people can pay whatever they will charge, and that's simply not the case. There are probably lots of people who cannot handle their bill exceeding the nominal amount as well. I suppose the real question is why carriers don't try to be realistic and work with customers in some fashion to pre-emptively avoid bill shock.
Take a look over the big pond. At least for data roaming costs, there is a cap at 50 Euros in the EU.
At least some German providers have the same cap for all your calls and data traffic, no matter where you are and what you do. And they don't even cut you off. It's just the maximum you pay.
Even 500 is too much. Since July all EU countries have a hard limit for telecom bills. For my provider it is 64 Euro (my cell phone plan for voice and data comes up to about 20 euro/month). To go over that I actually have to sign a form and send it to them. So there is no longer a problem in Europe, the rest of the world should follow with similar laws.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Here, mod this one down as well. I'll just make some FPs so that the pigeons mod me into karma heaven. You people are so stupid.
Good point ... that's such a small percentage of people, though. Most of the people with bill surprises are just going over their minutes.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
What next?
An email about my Electric bill getting to high in the summer?
Server at restaurant says "Excuse me, after the appetizer and drinks you are already at $100, do you want to keep eating?
Or best of all, what about Strip Clubs?!
If you are too damn stupid to pay attention to what you are doing you deserve what you get as long as everything is revealed up front.
Cellular providers do not have the consumer in mind. They never will. They know that once you are in a contract, you *have* to stick around for two years, and you probably will keep paying for 5-10 years before you switch to a new company or go bankrupt. Breaking contract costs just about 75% of what the two years of service would have cost you, so its pretty uncommon for people get out (unless a provider is willing to pay the fee to get you to switch over to them). Having just read this, do you think ATT, Sprint, et. al. give a flying fuck about their existing customers? I'm no expert in this stuff but my guess is NO!
Secondly, these companies have proven that they are willing to hide terms and fees in the fine print in order to screw the customer out of more money. They're so obvious in doing this that the FCC has singled out the industry and begun an investigation (see: TFA). My point is that they WILL hide the option to set a user-defined bill cap, that they will make the default cap virtually unreachable, and that this very article is evidence.
And lastly, I really think that every player in all of the telecom industries needs to be neutered. Communication is a fundimental human right, and now that we do it over wires and such, it has somehow become more of a privilege. Our freedom of communication is at the mercy of a few very large corporations that are run by sociopaths. These companies need serious government regulation, and NOW.
How hard is that?
Get some rocket fuel, put it in a cylinder, bolt some seats on and fly too the moon--How hard is that? Armchair engineering is armchair engineering.
From TFA: "The FCC cites some very sad stories about bill shock [such as the story of Kerfye Pierre, a 27-year-old Federal Emergency Management Agency employee in Hyattsville, Md., who received a $30,000 bill for texting and e-mailing in Haiti after the earthquake]. "
Step 1. Smuggle orphaned children to the US.
Step 2. Sell orphans to parents desperate to have a child.
Step 3. Use profits to pay cell phone bill.
Everyone wins.
Why not to require an automatic update to the next plan level if you go over - the shock is less and many people will just forget to move the plan back, so the telcos will be happy too?
Very much OT but if this is a problem, you could try changing the data connection settings on your phone (Access Point Name, Username and/or Password) so that it will no longer connect.
Great, cap the cell phone bill at double the cost of an unlimited plan.
Going over on data, or using data without a plan is obscenely overpriced. I recall calculating how much it would cost to download a Gigabyte of data without a plan with one carrier, and it was $5,000 for 1 GB!!!
I accidentally hit the online store button on my phone (which is just a minimal phone that is JUST for calls and rare texts, with no data plan... a "dumb phone", if you will.) The button click cost $0.10. It wasn't much for me, but I wondered how much money they generate by people hitting the wrong buttons and paying dimes here and there.
At the rates they charge, if I had bought an app, I am pretty sure that I'd have to pay more for the download's bandwidth than the download itself. Now there's a nice shtick! Charge them for browsing your store, then charge them for the merchandise, then charge them for downloading it! Many apps like to make online connections to, so then you can charge them for using it too! Maybe you they can 1-up themselves and require going online to delete your app as well.
I think the planned data charges are outrageous... but overages and non-planned data and text are in the realm of absurdity.
Wow, thank goodness! And just in the nick of time! It's a good thing that they're addressing this, I mean, before you know it, 10 years could have gone by costing American consumers millions of dollars! Can't wait until they start regulating everything else even more.
Last week called, the want your comment back.
Sorry, but... what the fuck? In all my years of reading Slashdot, I don't think I've ever read a comment that made less sense. What the hell does last week have to do with anything? Why the lame overused joke?
Actually, go prepaid.. I gave up my Verizon plan and went to PagePlus (pagepluscellular.com) keeping my phone and still using the Verizon network. Now I just add the minutes I need. 400 minutes for $25.. I don't need more and they are valid for 4 months.
There are other services such as Free Talk offering similar services. SEE: http://technorati.com/technology/article/is-your-cell-phone-bill-outrageous1/
You commented regarding the topic of an article from last week.
While it would be a nice feature if your phone company were required to notify you of overages (a smart carrier could make this a real value ad to their plans) and I don't disagree with the concept that the overage charges are way out of line given the amount they charge for your normal usage... Whatever happened to adults being responsible to watch their spending? Is your bank required to notify you when the money in your checking account is getting low or are you expected to stop writing check/using the debit card when you are out of money? With a cell phone you are spending minutes/megs of data/number of texts. Why is that so different? I have to say that as a parent with kids on a family plan I had to flat out laugh at the recent commercials from one of the major carriers... in particular one where the family is pleading for help from the superheros because their daughter "won't stop texting"... now I'm all for finding a better plan with a better price or more features etc... BUT if your kid is texting you into the poor house and "won't stop texting when you tell them to" the solution to that is... ready??? TAKE AWAY THEIR PHONE!!!! GASP! What a radical idea!!! Just my humble opinion!
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
Or rather, Khisanth Magus did
I don't read slashdot as regularly as I used to, so I have no clue what article you are talking about. I just know that one month my keys racked up $30 in data charges for me.
and then are too stupid to keep track of how much you have used it
Please clarify what tools you recommend using on both feature phones and smartphones to keep track of how many anytime minutes or international minutes as opposed to unmetered minutes have been used on the plan. If you meant "keep track in your head, and never lend the phone to someone else for an urgent call", then what makes you expect this skill, which I compare to counting cards in blackjack at the casino, to be widespread?
I could have rooted my phone and tethered it, but I chose to get the 3G stick to be fair
Why in the fuck are you taking some non-existant bullshit moral high ground for a company that will fuck you seven ways from sunday without a moments notice and would charge you everytime you pressed a button on your phone if they could. Fuck all these companies to hell. I don't give a shit about their profit margin and I'll do anything and everything to screw them back.
Those of us who figured out the two year hidden fees, never as cheap as they say "plan" scam switched to PREPAID years ago. Pay cash upfront for the phone, then add bucks to what you want to do. You set the money cap in advance, then talk/text/stream data (I use my prepaid half talk, half data, never text but I *could* if I wanted to, but texting is a ripoff ). Simple, to the point, easy to understand, no extra "fees" are even possible. If you have stuck in 30 bucks..that's it, that's all that can be spent, and etc.
I'm a lifelong "liberal"...and I don't think the FCC should be doing this.
If people can't keep track of their cell phone plan/usage, too damn bad - they shouldn't have one.
This is exactly what Sprint does. Mine is capped at 350$ and that is it. I like it that way and never have to worry about a 1k bill.
I work for Verizon and I get service through Sprint. You can infer from that what you will.
This regulation is very needed. It is extremely easy for this to happen to anyone. This is what happened to me. I bought a wireless Internet card from Verizon and loved it. I used it for 2 years, then I went into the Verizon store to renew my contract and they talked me into buying a new Internet Card. What they didn’t tell me was that the OLD card allowed unlimited data transfers and the NEW card charged a high rate for data transfers over a very low limit. After the first month of using my card, I got a $900 phone bill, all in extra data charges. I talked to Verizon, they gave me a break on that bill, but then it turned out that it was basically impossible to use the new Internet card without racking up hundreds of dollars of extra charges. It was too late to cancel my contract, so I had to pay the $75 monthly fee and NOT use the card for 18 months until I could cancel the card. I have had other problems with overcharges, but that one was the worse. Just last month I found $40 in “premium texting” charges on my bill that were imposed on me for services I never requested and never used, and even though Verizon credited that month and said they had blocked all future “premium texting” charges, I just noticed they are on my bill again. I can’t just drop Verizon because I have 5 other phones with them and all the cell phone companies do this. This is a very clear example of where government regulation to protect consumers is very, very needed. They should also set some clear standards for the cell phone companies for truth in advertising, easy to understand billing, and accurate cost information at the time of purchase.
Forbid bundling of phoned an contract, forbid included minutes and data, flat-rates, and make it possible that contracts finish every month without additional cost. And make the simple rule that the price per minute/MB can only go down with growing consumption. There is absolutely no background besides schemes close to gambling for the price jumping *up* by a factor of 100 once you reach a certain limit. Dear providers *if* you have difficulties to provide enough cell towers to handle what you promised, then please throttle the speed in a controlled way.
Enforce separation of the network operators and the companies bundling these to a services and put a stock market in between (like for electricity or other goods) to stimulate reselling.
If a simple per minute/MB scheme applies the customers could compare the offers, the company would not bet on your usage behavior (induced by their crippled branded crap), and for buying a phone you need cash or a loan like for buying anything else, so people would be conscious that they are not given presents.
Verizon will allow you to block data entirely.
To work for Verizon in the customer care department, the one that handles billing issues, you must go through 6 weeks of training on billing etc. Of the people I've seen complete that 6 weeks of training I've seen maybe 2 who understood it and that was only because they previously worked at banks doing call center work.
I work for Verizon and can honestly say that the majority of the call center people don't understand how this crap works. How could the layperson possibly have a chance at understanding it?
Between overages, billing cycles and proration, the average consumer doesn't have a chance. Seeing it from the inside I can tell you first hand, Verizon likes it this way.
I recently started working for US Cellular. They have a feature called "Overage Protection", which sends out alerts based on usage. You get a text message once you've hit 75% of allowance, then a second when you've hit 100% allowance. This is applied separately to voice and text.
Also, as part of a new plan structure, there's also a cap on overage charges. $50 for a single line, $150 for a family plan, and $50 x # of lines for business accounts.
I suppose the real question is why carriers don't try to be realistic and work with customers in some fashion to pre-emptively avoid bill shock.
Why would they want to work with the customers before they know whether that customer will suck it up and pay or not?
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I chose Verizon because it provides the best coverage. But they stick it to you with the plan choices:
$39.99 for 450 minutes
$59.99 for 900 minutes + 5 friends and family
$5 for 250 text messages
$10 for 500 text messages + free txt to other Verizon mobile
If the 450 minute plan included 5 free friends and family numbers I could easily get by with that. In the rare cases that I go over 450 minutes the extra minutes are always used on just a few family members. But it doesn't include friends and family so I have to go with the 900 minute plan, which of course never gets used up since most of the time is spent talking to those 5 numbers. 250 text messages would be more than enough if it included the free Verizon texting, since the people I text most are also on Verizon. But of course they only offer that perk with the expensive 500 message plan, and I never go over 500 messages anyway. Then as others have pointed out, they charge you to put caps on your usage and avoid overage charges. There is no such thing as an affordable and practical plan. You are either counting your minutes and texts and checking constantly to avoid overages, or you pay out the nose.
Maybe one day there will be another reliable carrier so I can give these bastards the boot.
The reason for a credit check on any of these services is that the companies are extending credit. You are using a service on credit and you pay for the service at the end of the billing cycle.
When banks and credit card companies (at least most of them) extend credit, they extend credit with a LIMIT.
Cell phone companies should be required to do the same. You should get a limit based on your credit. You should not be able to exceed that credit limit without being aware of your bill, and making a payment to "free up" credit on your account.
You should also be able to opt out of services you do not want at no cost.
This isn't nanny-state stuff, this is basic consumer protection that will increase confidence in the communications market.
-ted
Or, a limit which is agreed upon ahead of time. Presumably AT&T doesn't do credit checks to see that you are credit worthy up to several thousand dollars. Which makes me wonder on what basis they feel that allowing a user to rack up that kind of debt is sound.
I think the cap needs to be a lot lower than $500. Frankly, I never go over my minutes or texts, so I would set my limit at about $10 over my normal bill.
The point I was trying to make is not that there should be a One-Size-Fits-All cap, but a cap that, by FCC regulation, could be set to anything the consumer chose. I'd want to know right away if I went even a smidgen over my normal usage because I'm like that. A business person who makes lots of overseas calls and travels would set much higher limits...
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Call them again and ask. You have to speak with the one guy in the call centre who knows how the systems work and isn't afraid to apply that knowledge.
Before I got a text messaging plan and I just had a voice-only plan (on my Blackberry, because it was the cheapest plan to wait out my contract), I was dinged $0.15 for each text I received (even though I have no control over this). The first few times I asked them to remove this, they said it wasn't possible for my phone.
Eventually, after calling tech support about some other issue, I mentioned this problem to the tech and he disabled text messages.
(Maybe they had made it easier for their techs to do this after people like me would call and waste ten minutes of their CSRs' time for each bill with a $0.15 charge...)
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Why is an agency forcing a company to tell a customer that is paying for a service they are spending too much?
It should be up to the customer to be more cognizent of their usage and plan accordingly.
Adding another layer of regulatory scrutiny to an industry does not make things cheaper, it just makes it more rigid and prone to errors.
Wake up people.. learn to manage your own usage.
Who is John Galt?
I'm always a little scared of losing my phone. It's entirely possible that the guy or girl who finds it will start making 1-900 calls, or even regular long distance calls to obscure places. In a couple hours, this could easily be hundreds of dollars.
I called my phone provider Fido (in Canada) once to put a cap on this, they said "no". I was rather pissed at the time, because, like others have posted, they have caps on pre-paid plans, and they also have caps on people who have crappy credit. But no, I've got reasonable credit, so my liability is basically unlimited.
Then I forgot about it... until today. Hmm... my contract is due for renewal, maybe it's time to switch to prepaid...
In finance there is a concept called "spike the firm". The idea is that a trader writes a bunch of way out of the money options on some asset. This allows said trader to collect a small premium every year. Hopefully the event where the trader looses a massive amount doesn't occur on their watch, and they collect a nice yearly salary and just leave if things go badly early.
I think these MASSIVE out of country charges are the consumer finance equivalent of "spike the firm". Call it "spike the customer". You give them a nice plan, they use it a lot, and then some week they happen to go on vacation to, or go to do business, in a different country (typically US -> Canada or vice versa), and WHAMMO.
Now, I ask this: Can international roaming REALLY be that expensive for the firms to implement that they have to charge wicked multiples (100?) of what the domestic carrier charges?? No way. The are just waiting for the customer to fall into a hole and rape them.
What should happen here is that these excessive charges should simply be banned. It's straight up price gouging, pure and simple.
Or...next time you have a cell phone executive as a customer at the local garage, charge them $5,000 for an oil change and say "well, it was in the fine print! Do you really want to wreck your credit rating over this??".
P
the best way to address cell phone bill shock is to better regulate the cellphone industry so that they charge cheaper rates for their plans. Used to be a landline would run what, $25 a month? cellphone bills often run higher than $100/month; iphone plans are what, $150 after all the hidden fees and taxes? so until the FCC uses their regulatory powers for good, i doubt congress will fix the system that pretty much locks in consumers to 2 year contracts for overpriced phones and services.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
First, let it be said that I am not an expert on these matters, nor did I RTFA. However, that being said, It definitely appears that the high cost of entry into this market is the source for most of the industry's issues. It leads to less competition and a sort of oligarchical group think by the participating bodies (usually corporations). To me, this seems obvious. If it costs an astronomical sum to enter into a market, it seems only natural that the only people (corporations) in the market would be the ones that can be relatively sure that they can extract large sums of money from the market. The inevitable consequence of this is business model entitled "How can I screw the customer the most and still get away with it?" Perhaps I'm not well informed enough, but it would seem to me that the real solutions for "high cost" markets is government ownership of infrastructure (like sewers and roads), or at least a mandate for non-reproduction of distribution (like power lines or water lines). It is true that government usually finds the least efficient method of doing anything, I will not dispute that. However, we can all agree that have three or four sets of sewers, roads, power lines, and/or water lines would be even more stupid than current government management of these items. The point is that the real cost of entry into this market is the creation of cell phone towers and other associated infrastructure. Granted, the big boys may have contracts that allow them to share resources, but I would bet dollars to donuts that they make a point of mutually excluding start ups from these contracts in order to prevent competition that doesn't agree with their business model (see above). In short, the government is full of idiots, and the free market is full of idiots, because we are a nation composed mostly of idiots. Lacking a Philosopher King capable of determining Merit (with a capital M), we should probably just bet on pitting the government idiots against the free market idiots and hope that they beat the stupid out of each other until something usable is made. Leaving one or the other to their own devices is the worst thing we could do.
As long as I put 200 Swedish crowns (~$30) per month on my prepaid card I have free calling within the carrier's network, free 'unlimited' [1] data and 'low' [2] rates to other networks. I can change the 'plan' on this prepaid card whenever I want so if I plan to make more international calls I can change to the 'World plan' which gives me lower international rates than available on our landline (even using carrier select prefixes which have been available for a few years now). While I still feel that all this telecommunications stuff is severely overpriced - I still pay between $0.03 and $0.10 per sent SMS, up to $0.50 if the 160 byte status message happens to cross a border - it seems that this is one of the areas where we Europeans are better off than you North Americans. Of course we do pay up to twice the price for our computers and such so maybe it evens out...
[1] I think they start lowering speed to 64 Kbit/s if I happen to go over 1 GB / month, it might be 5 GB / month as well as I never hit this limit nor would be able to with my GPRS HTC Prophet...
[2] low is relative, the price still stands in shrill contrast to the actual cost
--frank[at]unternet.org
AT&T does willingly tell you. They even have an app for that. More than that, the AT&T service numbers are built in to every AT&T phone.
For once, the FCC has a purpose, maybe they can back off piracy a little bit, and tackle the more important problem, of getting stiffed by the big cell co. Seriously, I have to watch my heart each time I open a letter from the cell company, and I have all sorts of tweaking imaginable and yet they still manage to surprise me.
I wish
1) the cell phones had real time counters of how many minutes you have left for your package...
not counting the free minutes of course, so after 6pm, they dont count as you have a night time package...
2) same for bandwidth for database plans...
3) allow for a much easier way to stop the minutes from being used up, say put a lock on your account from making calls until you unlock it, not on your phone as hackers can bypass this, but I mean with a password and call to central, where you tell them, lock it for the next 5 days or so, could also be considered parental control if you like...but I would use it on myself....till the end of month and get new minutes...
4) Get a message saying you have passed your minutes, or bandwidth, if you continue we will charge x per minute or mb downloaded...
This could be easy enough, and I hope this is more of what they have planned....
Also maybe a special flag that interrupts your call (like the calling cards do) so that if you happen to call japan by accident (the flag would be first time calling japan with no prior history of calling there, and you are passing 10 minutes....flag!) which would ask you to say yes to continue, then with no response, as most children or accidental calls end up with no response...you would be cut off from the phone call...
But that would be in a really cool cell. co. world, not like the one we live in now!
What pisses me off is when my carrier (Fido) decided they'd be "helpful" by completing long distance calls. If I dial a call that's in another area (without using 1), it'll give a quick message saying essentially "this is a long distance call, stand by while we complete it properly for you." The message goes by fairly quickly, so if you're juggling your handset then between dialing and putting it back up to your ear, you may miss it. Similarly, the initialization time for some bluetooth devices may cause you to miss message. Since the new area-code in my province (778) can apply to a cellular here or 500km away, you can't trust those to indicate distance, either.
You know what, I'm not so f*cking stupid I can't redial "1" on my call. I don't need a sneaky "assist" from the phone company in racking up a long-distance bill. These companies need to allow customers to "opt-in" to retarded features like that, or - at the very least - allow them to opt-out of them, and to set a ceiling on their bills for overage.
"if you used the net 25 times in a month then it's probably not accidental, or there is something wrong with your phone."
Yes, there *IS* something wrong with the phone, it's *DESIGNED* to maximize hitting the damn internet button by accident. As per the GP:
"cheaper non-smart phones have a prominent button for "marketplace" or some such WAP service?"
I've seen plenty of this here. If there's a D-pad, then the button is often in the middle, or the one closest to the number keys to allow for easy misdialing. Hell, I've had those phones before, and yes even if you can re-map buttons, that internet button is often not re-mappable.
It's *ALWAYS* in a place where it's easy to hit by accident, either when using other common functions, or by pocket-dialing, whatever. It's *NOT* there for the convenience of the customer, but for the profit of the carrier.
As an example, see this picture. On the local carriers, that down-button on the D-pad is going to be the internet button, because it's easiest to mash accidentally. On a phone like this it's even worse, because it'll be a button that easily pocket-dials.
On separate occasions, I've had AT&T block both data and text messages (incoming and outgoing) on lines where I did not have data and messaging plans. All it took each time was a short phone call to their customer service.
There's more to it than just users that don't keep track of their usage. For example, I recently told a particular app on my phone to download a fair bit of information (~8gb) so it would be stored locally and I could access it when I was in areas without service. This of course was in my home, and my phone was happily connected to my wireless network. Shortly after going to bed, apparently my wireless router decided to wedge and die. The phone merrily switched over to 3G and continued to download data throughout the night. I'm on a 200mb plan (which on average I use around half of, as I'm almost always in a wi-fi area), and needless to say in a single night my expected data cost went up by an absolutely absurd amount.
Here's the thing - as a customer, I've chosen a 200mb/month plan. This is an implicit signal to the carrier that I PLAN ON USING AROUND 200 MB a month. For the carrier to even permit data usage to exceed double digit multipliers of my monthly plan without express consent by me (or even a notification!) is ludicrous. Clearly, if this is happening, something is occurring that I as a customer did not intend. Yet the carriers refuse to permit me to control this intent by saying "don't serve me any data once I reach my cap unless I tell you otherwise."