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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.'
There is a tiny "Island" of America called Point Roberts at the extreme NW corner of Washington State. The Canadians who live right along that border are forever fighting with their cell providers to take off roaming charges because the phone will often pick up the AT&T cell tower on the US side instead of the Telus (or whatever) tower on the Canadian side. The carriers seem quite helpless to fix the problem; some people I know there have to get roaming charges taken off every month.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
I switched from Verizon when they screwed me like this (in that case, they refused to reverse a $300 overage charge). I switched to AT&T where I got "rollover minutes" so going over my minutes wouldn't result in that kind of overage. I still ended up paying for random data roaming (which I learned to have turned off before international trips), and when my wife accidentally used my line to call her family overseas. Plus AT&T started finding ways to charge us an extra allotment of data for my wife's cell that would suspiciously jump over the 250MB data line at around the 27th day of billing.
Now I'm on TMobile, where I don't pay overage for minutes (unlimited!), I have unlimited data (if I use my 2GB high speed, I go to EDGE unless I authorize more data - no overage). I pay no overage for roaming data, or texts. My wife pays $10/mo for being able to call her mom in europe on her cell, again unlimited.
All in all, we get 5 lines on our TMO account for what we were paying for 2 lines on either AT&T or Verizon. And the quality and coverage is better in almost every way (yes, smaller towns and inside museums/warehouses will result in bad/no coverage for TMO - I don't land in those situations very often at all).
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FYI - carriers don't make money on regular subscriptions. Instead, ROAMING charges fuel the profits. And they're HUGE profits - think $/minute for a phone call, 5 cents per kB (not kiB) not including headers, etc. (At 5c/kB, that's $50/MB)
In fact, if you ever wondered why Telus and Bell (Canadian carriers, who normally did CDMA) installed 3G HSPA equipment 5 years ago... it's because Bell was a huge Olympic sponsor. And with athletes and visitors coming to Canada, they will most likely be carrying GSM/3GPP phones. And whose network would THOSE roam on? Rogers, who didn't sponsor the Olympics.
So Bell would be sponsoring the Olympics, but Rogers would be picking up the massive profits from roaming visitors. Naturally that needed to be fixed which is why Telus/Bell (who share equipment) rolled out HSPA equipment post-haste so they could at least get at that roaming profit. Given they have 1x equipment normally, the sensible plan would've been to just install LTE equipment when it became available.
So yeah, Canada carriers DO gouge, and your data was probably charged at an "innocent" rate of pennies per kB. $750 for 50MB would be 1.5 cents/kB.
That's the trick though. They charge you $700. You call them, they charge you $70. You are happy because they dropped "most of" the charges. Really they should have only charged you $7 in the first place. They made themselves look like good guys, while at the same time overcharging you. And for every once in a while there's somebody who doesn't call in to get the charges reduced and just pays the bill (like a corporate account), and they make a huge amount of money for nothing.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Their alerts are not very timely though. So, sure you can stare at the usage meter and catch it, but it might be days before you get an alert email. I did this for a personal vm, just because I wanted to make sure it didn't go crazy by accident. I set it to $10 and $20 alerts I think. By the time I got the $10 alert it was over $13. Now imagine I was a business and we were talking thousands or tens of thousands.... That's pretty bogus.