AT&T Charges $750 For One Minute of International Data Roaming

reifman (786887) writes 'Last week, AT&T shut down my data service after I turned roaming on in Canada for one minute to check Google maps. I wasn't able to connect successfully but they reported my phone burned through 50 MB and that I owed more than $750. Google maps generally require 1.3 MB per cell. They adamantly refused to reactivate my U.S. data service unless I 'agreed' to purchase an international data roaming package to cover the usage. They eventually reversed the charges but it seems that the company's billing system had bundled my U.S. data usage prior to the border crossing with the one minute of international data roaming.'

Comments

50MB = 750$

[nurb432]

WTF? Not that a 50GB warrants a bill like that either.. this reminds me of the bad old days where you never knew if you went over your allocated time/minutes/etc until you got a bill, highly inflated for what it is.

This practice should be outlawed.

Re:50MB = 750$

[lgw]

This is why I like T-Mobile. While coverage is (and likely will always be) quite limited for 4G, I've never seen them cross the line from "typical big company evil" to the black depths of "phone company evil". Plus, they have decent pre-paid plans, which lets you strictly limit surprises.

Re:50MB = 750$

[WarJolt]

Reminds me of running instances on AWS. AT&T has no financial incentive to reduce these surprise charges. Seriously there should be a hard cap that we can set. Sure we are responsible for these charge, but most of the times naive consumers are not aware. Amazon clearly posts the prices of their instances, but it's not uncommon to get a $30,000 bill accidentally due to some developer testing out their application by spinning off instances. You get charged for the whole hour when an instance starts on AWS and things can show up on their accounting system weeks later.

A real time system for monitoring usage should be mandated by law and sufficient warning should be available. A data roaming plan should automatically be applied if it will save you money. Most importantly we should have the ability to set a cap.

Re:50MB = 750$

[Grishnakh]

To be fair, T-Mobile in the USA is not the same company as whatever has that name in Europe. The US company is only partially owned by Deutsche Telekom in fact.

Re:50MB = 750$

[raydobbs]

Guaranteed by your personal credit card? Whose fault is that? If your teaching, get the institution to foot the bill, so if (or in your case - when) they blitz AWS, the institution has recourse to bill the student and you aren't on a express train to financial raping. Your school should never have put you on the financial hook for covering such expenses - at least if they have any credibility.

AT&T

[oldhack]

You learned not to touch hot things when you were a toddler. AT&T is one of those things that burn you. Pathetic you learned this now - I blame your parents.

Re:AT&T

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Back in the late Sixties, everyone regarded AT&T as the Acme of Evil, an avatar of the Great Enemy on Earth. The Beast was chopped into bits, stakes driven through the multiple hearts of the bits, and each bit chained and confined to separate parts of the land. People grew complacent, and slowly the separate parts of the Beast began to stir. Tentacles slithered into emerging areas of the telecommunications industry and into the pockets of regulators and legislators. Slowly, the bits began to reassemble themselves into a new form until now it has fully reemerged to prey on the unwary.

Re:Newsflash: AT&T Screws Its Customers

[circletimessquare]

no, it's not newsworthy

but it feels good giving them as much bad PR as we can handle

post a story like this every other month

"consumers screwed by oligopolies" category should be a thing

Re:t-mobile

[Voyager529]

... just sayin
Every one of their new plans they have unlimited data including international.

It's among the reasons I too am a customer of theirs. It's also what worries me about the Sprint merger. I have a gut feeling that we'll end up with a Sprint-like T-Mobile (not super-evil, but still a huge corp), rather than a T-Mobile like Sprint (a company that seems to go out of its way to make life miserable for Ma Bell and VZW).

That's what you get

[xednieht]

That's what you get for using AT&T - they suck. T-Mobile is the best for people who travel internationally especially Europe and Canada.

Re:Point Roberts

[cbhacking]

Or, you know, just disable roaming. Every phone I've owned in the last four years, and probably the ones before it, had that option...