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The Ridiculous Tech Fees You're Still Paying
Esther Schindler writes "None of us like to spend money (except on shiny new toys). But even we curmudgeons can understand that companies need to charge for things that cost them money; and profit-making is at the heart of our economy. Still, several charges appear on our bills that can drive even the most complacent techie into a screaming fit. How did this advertised price turn into that much on the final bill? Why are they charging for it in the first place? Herewith, fees that make no sense at all — and yet we still fork over money for them. For example: 'While Internet access is free in coffee shops, some public transit, and even campsites, as of 2009 15% of hotels charged guests for the privilege of checking their e-mail and catching up on watching cat videos. Oddly, budget and midscale hotel chains are more likely to offer free Wi-Fi, while luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.'"
Internet costs in Australia. Its not uncommon to pay around $70/month for ADSL 1 speeds (1.5Mbps).
This isn't odd at all. People staying at budget and midscale hotel chains are more price sensitive, so they're going to not come to your hotel if you don't have free wifi. The people staying a luxury hotels are not as price sensitive and are more likely to be worried about other things beside a charge for internet access when selecting a hotel.
Aww snap! $250 cell phone bill from overages in data usage.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.'
The company is paying for that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
>Oddly, budget and midscale hotel chains are more likely to offer free Wi-Fi, while luxurious hotels — already costing the traveler more — regularly ding us.
Not odd in the slightest -- the majority of said "luxurious" hotel rooms are being consumed by (in no particular order) #1 the price insensitive and #2 business travelers (arguably a great overlap, if not outright subset, of group #1).
Few of either group in covering a hotel bill for a few nights in San Francisco are going to care much if it's $845 or $885 with Internet.
Finally, those in group #2 are much more likely to have elite status with the hotel, which typically (at the higher levels) includes free internet -- making it a "valuable" perk for your brand loyalty...
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There is no try at jedinite.com
Their last example - payroll cards with fees ought to be outright illegal. IMO.
Why pay? Connect to their access point and tunnel all of your traffic over DNS or ICMP. The firewalls that they use rarely block ICMP and almost never block UDP port 53. All you need is to have a client installed on your machine and run a server out on the interwebs somewhere that is running the right server software and acts as a proxy. The tech to do this has been around for quite a while, and most linux distros have the clients and servers in their repositories. The main system used for DNS is called iodine and there are two different, very good ICMP tunnels that I know of. One is here and another here. If you search through your favorite linux or BSD distro's repository search for "ip over icmp" or "ip over dns" and you'll find what you need.
My uncle was the first person we knew to have touch-tone service, back in the 1960s. I think there was a $1.50/month charge for it. By the time my folks got their first touch-tone phone in the early '80s touch-tone service was free. In 1997 Glenn's partner looked over the phone bill and found that they were still getting charged the $1.50/month fee.
Up until the late 1960s you didn't own your phone, you leased it from Ma Bell. When I worked in a bank trust department in the early 1990s we paid a lot of our customers' bills for them, and I was shocked to see that many of them were STILL leasing their phone from the phone company. In one case at least I knew that the phone had been thrown out when it broke two decades before.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I found the best place for WiFi in Las Vegas was the municipal public library. You need to go out of your way to find it, but the librarians were pretty decent about helping you get hooked up if you were courteous and reasonable. It sure as hell beat trying to jerk around with the hotel management and the bandwidth was a hell of a lot better too. If you wanted to even bother, all you need to do is sit in you (presumably rental) car with your laptop or go inside and they even had outlets... or you could get onto terminals in the library.
An added bonus by bringing your own equipment is that you essentially had no real time limit either.
By far and away the worst places were the resort hotels, but even the budget motels are a pain in the rear.
Don't even get me started with "roaming fees" for cell phones. Las Vegas is a death trap for most cell phone carriers. I purposely bought a throw-away cell phone at Wal-Mart with pre-paid minutes explicitly for calling from Vegas on the last time I was there. A buddy of mine brought in an AT&T cell phone, and ended up with a $500 cell phone bill before he left after just a few days in that city. His typical cell phone bill was usually about $40/month. Reno is almost as bad as Vegas too. By using the throw away cell phone, I only had to pay $50, including the brand-new cell phone and I even had minutes left over after the trip. It is just one of those "buyer beware" kind of things.