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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.'
They now bundle "location services" for your AT&T credit card so that instead of somebody robbing you for your wallet, they now have to rob both your cell phone and your wallet, meaning you'll lose even more when you get robbed.
It's a feature, not a bug.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
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.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is what monopolies get you, but aside from that why would *anyone* use their US phone for such a thing?
Buy a sim or get a cheap Canadian burner phone or.... how about just asking directions.
Data roaming is a scam just like text messages.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Try going to Point Loma in San Diego. Your phone will switch from US to Mexican cells and back.
Then you get to argue with the provider about the bill....
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.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
... just sayin
Every one of their new plans they have unlimited data including international.
$15 a meg at least it's not $20 a meg as that is $1000 for 50MB.
in laws used 20MB and it cost like $700
i called AT&T and they took off most of it
and i explained to my family that next time you go to mexico turn off roaming or pay for an unlocked phone and use a local SIM or buy the international package. i was going to add it on, but i didn't know my inlaws were taking their phones
In parts of Niagara Falls, Canada, it's also possible to bounce between US and Canadian carriers.
I just turn off data roaming for my phone and pick up a SIM for wherever I'm staying.
I'm not saying this isn't ridiculous, but is it really Slashdot-worthy news? AT&T has been screwing its customers over on roaming charges since cell phones were invented, and even extreme cases like this one are a dime a dozen.
Sucks for the OP but it doesn't seem news-worthy to me.
($750/50MB)*1.3MB ~= $20. Ouch!
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.
When I finally dumped ATT (after twice shutting off my service while having paid them in full) my life took a turn for the better. A week or so after dumping them I got a call from ATT customer retention trying to get me back. When I told them that their billing is messed up and I would rather cut off the end of my finger and write letters in blood using the post office than go back to ATT the rep said "Many people have told me the same thing.". After hanging up I'm not sure she referred to the billing mess or the writing in blood part.
My unlocked, prepaid, 6 year old RAZR works perfectly well as a cell phone all over the world (with local SIM). And I don't have to worry about roaming charges or data plans.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Before leaving on my five-week visit to Europe, I enabled Verizon's buck-a-minute Global Voice Roaming on my iPhone, after having the website verify that a 4S could be used overseas. It qualified, but when I got over there I encountered five solid weeks of No Service, and so Verizon got no revenue whatever out of my overseas experience. I, on the other hand, was able to make do by using the Skype app over WiFi.
Yes when you cross the border you don't get service (I live in NY near border).
However, a cheap prepaid sim up in Canada is easy to get at a convenience store or mall.
So I pay $42.50/month (ebay for wife, discount for auto refill on mine) for unlimited calls/texts/data (LTE speeds for 3gb, 2g/3g speeds after 3gb), and no surprise bills. With my unlocked Nexus 4, just get a cheap sim when you cross a border, go international.
I tried talking a few people into pre pay, but they don't like it. They like monthly bills and not having to remember to fill every month. I don't get it. Why pay a premium?
Yes customer service sucks, but I personally haven't had issues with ST. And I can always switch to net10 or another AT&T provider at end of period with no penalties if I want.
(I use AT&T because the coverage is better then Tmobile and it's sim based. I'd go verizon for their coverage if they did Sim Cards).
I ran into this issue when my iPhone was downloading email and roaming.
ATT billed me $500 and I wouldn't pay it. They tried to blame Apple and I informed them that the iPhone was their issue, too, as they were the only carrier for it. As it turns out, customer service is really collections, and we had a fine yelling match. Finally the lady agreed to send it up the line, and I had her read me exactly what she was going to send, since she did not have my interests at heart.
They did reverse the charges, and apple added the disable roaming option.
And heard lots of stories of people running into this issue. The #1 cause is user error - assuming the phone knows if it's in the U.S. or Canada. Your phone does not know which side of the border it's on; or if it does know via GPS, that info is not tied in with the phone's radio. Consequently, if you're on the U.S. side of the border but the Canadian tower has a stronger signal and your phone is set to allow roaming, your phone may roam on the Canadian tower incurring international roaming charges. Lots of people who live on the U.S. side of the border and never crossed into Canada reported this problem. In all likelihood, the 50 MB of international roaming data probably wasn't during the 1 min he saw the phone connected to a Canadian tower - it was in spurts as he drove near the border and the phone hopped between U.S. and Canadian towers.
You have to manually turn off roaming (most phones still have that setting - the carriers have only eliminated the force-roam setting). That guarantees the phone will not hop onto a Canadian tower. Only after you've crossed into Canada and the phone (still not roaming) loses signal do you turn roaming back on. That guarantees you'll be using the U.S. towers for as long as possible.
Generally anybody who regularly crosses into Canada or plans to spend some time there gets a Canadian roaming option. On my carrier 8 years ago (Sprint) it was $5 extra a month, and knocked calls down to $0.25/min and no charge for Canadian roaming data as long as I stayed within my normal roaming limit (less than 20% or so of my total monthly data usage). That actually turned out to be cheaper than getting a second Canadian cell phone (as hard as it is to believe, their carriers are worse than the U.S. carriers). People who live on the U.S. side and never crossed into Canada during the roaming periods used to be able to get the charges removed with a simple call to customer service complaining they were charged for Canadian roaming when they never went to Canada. But a few months before I moved away, I got a letter saying they would be discontinuing this courtesy and I would just have to disable roaming on my phone if I did not want to be charged international roaming, or buy the Canada roaming option (which I already had).
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.
Hope is the currency of fools
AT&T is the company that tried to bill me for $thousands of dollars for a few hours of international calls while on their "no worries" international calling plan, that should have cost about $25.
MetroPCS has a $5/month flat rate international call plan.
AT&T is the company that tried to get my son to pay $600 for a contract on a phone he never purchased. (He started to buy, then I declined to co-sign because of the $thousands of dollars AT&T had just tried to get me to pay)
AT&T is pretty much the definition of evil in my book.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
i did some unusual long distance data and phone calls (all within the USA) and they charged be an insanely exorbitant amount of money and i said "NO!" i am not paying that and canceled their service, they occasionally send me snailmail spam to sign up but NO! dont want some outdated dinosaur company run by greedy old men, fuck ATT they can go to hell, i will never use them again
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
You know AT&T's logo looks like the Death Star for a reason!
On the same page at the same time, "AT&T To Use Phone Geolocation To Prevent Credit Card Fraud" (the example for which was credit card transactions in Russia) and "AT&T Charges $750 For One Minute of International Data Roaming". That's brilliant.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I turned on data in France long enough to check my location on google maps once. $44 for that, no "misplaced" charges from before I entered that country, just the actual roaming charge for that data.
Why is this still happening like it's 2005.
I have an attorney friend with two AT&T cell phone lines.
A client was disputing billed hours (despite my friend charging a flat rate...); the client was the one continually calling him, asking questions he had already answered over and over...
anyway, on the AT&T website the link to download detailed call records next to each phone line summary only downloads data from the first line, even though it appears to be separate files; there was no way to download detailed usage data for secondary lines.
This was causing a HUGE amount of anxiety for my friend, because he couldn't find official call records to match his personal logs, until I figured out that AT&T online billing was providing data for the wrong phone!
A severe bitch session with AT&T on the phone followed shortly, and after a few escalations and transfers, he got a technician to e-mail a copy of the data he needed.
So I'm planning a trip to Europe -> Netherlands, Germany Austria Hungary. I have a Nexus 4 which I hear works well in Europe.
What SIM should I get?
Yes! If you ever drive I-8 (Tucson to San Diego) make sure your phone is in airplane mode.
Ting (ting.com) allows setting hard usage caps for voice, SMS and data.
Also South Surrey/White Rock - just last week got to challenge and decline Telus Mobility's $1.50 US roaming charge ('Welcome to the USA!') while on the way to my GF's place.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
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Long Haired Lover from Liverpool
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We're just an Okay Business Bureau around here... BBB is somebody else's trademark.
I used to work for an organization where a handful of our users traveled internationally on a fairly regular basis (a few times a year). Because permanent international plans were much too expensive, we "activated" international roaming on an as needed basis. Without fail, every month following an international roaming activation AT&T would fail to restore the account back to its previous plan. The plans always ended up on the most expensive plan AT&T had at the time, completely ignoring the corporate plan that we had with them.
Telecom operators do rip you a new one daily. That's no surprise regardless of where you live.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Or, you know, use a not-shit phone that supports disabling roaming without entering airplane mode. Jeez, what piece of crap doesn't do *that* anymore?
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It depends on what your phone habits are. If you just receive an occasional call like a minute per day or so then just keep your sim card and use wifi hotspots (a lot of shops and cafés have them).
If you make a lot of local calls in each country or want to do frequent data traffic without WiFi then get a prepaid card for each country. It depends on how long you are staying too.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Unless you are treating Ebola patients with MSF in the Congo, your overseas travel is most likely in areas bathed in multiple layers of accessible WiFi. Restrict your data use to that. Also, as several others have noted, get a sim from the local shop. It's cheap and easy. You do have an unlocked phone, right?
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
T-Mobile US. Then it'll work on all those countries, with no extra costs for data or messages (calls cost a bit extra), and you get to keep your US number while overseas!
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Which map lets you access live traffic data offline?
The FM radio app, perhaps?
If you have a prepaid phone there can be no surprises on your bill. If you have a postpaid plan you have written the carrier a blank check. No matter where you are your device can go insane/be hacked and run up insane bills that you have agreed to pay on postpaid - or you can make a simple error like this, which doubtless happens dozens of times a day. This is why postpaid needs a credit check: they are checking out the depth of your pocket, how much you have to lose if they ding your credit.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I know a family that lives next to the US-Canada border (their driveway is less than 500 meters from 0 ave.) they had to call their cell-phone provider so often to reverse the charges that the provider started just automatically waiving any roaming charges on their phone because they were sick of getting the phone calls! (Note: They live on the Canadian side).
Many years ago I was also dinged for provably impossible amount of roaming data given duration printed on bill while roaming from AT&T within the US.
The roaming network was basically old school GSM data service limited to 14.4k for ~5 minutes (and naturally completely useless) claiming I had used about a dozen MB data... this is physically impossible.. it takes about 5 minutes on a perfect day to transfer half of one MB at 14.4k.
At time suspected something wrong with cutovers between roaming and not...was able to get roaming charges dropped. Little surprised these old-school data pricing structures still exist but not so surprised at all AT&T wouldn't address basic problems within their billing that lead to gross over-charging.
I turned on google maps in Italy. No data made it through and the phone never left Edge mode (2g). Somehow I had $300 worth of charges for 10 mins of trying. More data was billed then edge could have moved during that time if it was maxed out the entire time.
The first phone call immediate got $25 knocked off but nothing more and was a half hour and two reps. The second call got it to $150 or so as they said they would split it with me. I insisted all along that I got NOTHING out of the attempt and they said they had no power. I was promised a call back by someone who could fix it but that did not happen in the time they said. The third call was an hour, two reps again with promised call back that did not happen. The final call not only got it fixed but they sent me a (useless but sellable) microcell and full credit.
It sucks that nearly 3 hours of my time and theirs was wasted. The major point that got me my money back was they did not return my calls when they said they would. They insisted the entire time that the data flowed and I was using the internet successfully.
Read Rick Steve's page about an American in Europe and how to use your fone. Roaming, unlocked fones, SIM cards and more. https://www.ricksteves.com/tra...
Why are you allowing unlimited instances to be created?
I regularly cross borders in Europe by car between two countries with roaming switched off on my Samsung Note 3. Without roaming enabled, I *always* had a $0.10 cent charge for roaming, even though I had it *disabled*. Even with roaming disabled, some phones - like Samsung - still send data to the wrong cell. Bug, most likely, but a costly one if you make the trip frequently or if you live on the border. Only thing that helped for me was installing a tool that would switch off data when I turn off the display - since then no more charges. Otoh I do now have to enable data each time I want to look up something, but I accept that minor inconvenience.
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I worked near the US Mexico border and could only connect to a service in Tijuana. Camping in the mountains east of San Diego my fone displayed a message about roaming in Mexico, I wondered if it was a Border Patrol spoof to monitor smugglers as I was 25 or more miles from the border. Goto settings and disable roaming.
Victoria, BC has it, too. I can't step onto my balcony without getting a "Welcome to the US" text from AT&T.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
I called a relative living about 30 miles away from montreal, Rogers wants $0.35/minute for that call. (I'd love to see the cost for that call)
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
...anybody would even be surprised by this. AT&T has been raping consumers for decades. I can't believe you even signed up with those fuckers.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
We had a similar experience at my previous job in the Detroit/Windsor area. There were a few of instances where our engineers were working offsite in Detroit and their cellphones would connect to Canadian towers. Our Accounting department would receive bills with several hundred dollars of unexpected international roaming charges even though no one left the country. We also had a portable wi-fi hotspot but no one was willing to use it since the president made us create a sign out form stating that they were responsible for excess charges.
Don't know if others here are getting this, but if I click to the left of the comments Youtube Videos load and cover the comments page. If anyone else is seeing this behavior on Slashdot, any suggestions to stop it? (I have JS disabled so maybe this is a downside to HTML5 for which will be needed new methods of crippling the shit thrown-into browser by the likes of whoever took-over and ruined Mozilla in the name of "empowering designers!!! TAKE BACK THE WEB [from the user]".)
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
What people don't realise is that when roaming, everything is actually backhauled to the home network. So what happens when you roam is that your data goes to the roaming network's towers, then is carried back internationally to your home carrier, then out across the internet, then back to your home carrier, then backhauled to the roaming network, then to your phone. Every phone call, piece of data, or text message, needs to cross the world twice to get to and from you.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
If you think this is sick, you should see what they charge you when it isn't even working.
As an Australian who's never visited the Americas, there'd be little purpose for me to ever purchase anything from AT&T. However for years I've received statements and invoices for an American. I tried to e-mail AT&T to ask them to stop but never received any reply. I called AT&T a handful of times and told them about this issue, and received replies like "why does it bother you anyway? Shouldn't you just ignore or delete those e-mails [every 3-7 days for the past 4 years]".
I did eventually solve the issue... I did a forgot password on the account and received the e-mail for it, allowing me to login. On their web portal the only thing I couldn't change was the e-mail address. So I ordered the customer every additional extra I could, including a new iPhone, without being prompted for any credit card information. Haven't received an e-mail from AT&T since.
My experience makes me conclude AT&T are a terrible teleco who feel they're exempt from unsolicited e-mail legislation in both my country and the USA, and have absolutely no interest in helping anyone. But I do hope the customer was allowed to keep the iPhone at no cost
Clearly the problem here is not AT&T or this simple consumer. The problem is nation states. If we didn't have borders, international roaming wouldn't exist.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
This kind of crap is a good reason to switch to T-mobile. I'll check it out before I go overseas next, but it looks like international is essentially treated like national rates.
How is this even news? AT&T clearly publishes their international roaming rates, their international calling rates, and their international data roaming rates. Cell phones have been in existence for 40+ years. If you can't read your own calling plan nor your own contract details, and if you can't afford the roaming rates, please turn your cell phone off, and while you're at it, please turn off your tendency to flame technology news sites when you pull a dipshit maneuver.
$750 for 50mb of data transfer is highly exploitive. It is about 50 times even the usual sucker rates. It is exploitive even if most users know about it.
This is like buying a coke in an airport with a credit card expecting to pay something unreasonable such as $7 and coming home to find a bill for $750. Most people would consider that fraud even if the price had been posted on the menu.
What is the story here?
He knew his data plan was US-only, that's why he turned off data when he crossed the border.
As soon as he crossed the border, AT&T offered him a chance to sign up for international data plan, he choose not to.
AT&T warned him of the international data rate ($15.36/meg) as soon as they knew he was in Canada.
When asked, AT&T offered him the chance to retroactively enroll in an international data plan to cover his usage ($30, or slightly more than the 1.5M (the estimated usage of the one google map search he *chose* to use after turning data back on in Canada) * $15.36/meg rate he was warned of when he entered Canada).
What more could AT&T have reasonably done? Signed him up for an international data plan without his permission?
At what point do his decisions to:
- live near the border
- purchase a US-only data plan
- not sign-up for an international data plan when offered
Become the fault of AT&T?
Ken
Went on a trip to cabo mexico and when I landed, I turned on my phone to see the time/calls etc.. i had a few apps using auto update unfortunately and they finished updating before I even got the notice I was ROAMING, and giving me the option to select an intl data plan. by the time I shut everything off they had me at a 400$ charge, to which 7 calls and multiple tiers later I finally got reimbursed $450 for the waste of time
That makes the price of a one-time "how to use a map" training course, a basic compass, and a map for the city/ country that you're going to look positively good value. Of course, that also requires a little forethought and planning, plus the common sense to pick up a map when you arrive at your destination (if you're travelling on an emergency call out), but these are still low-priced commodities. Apart from the common sense.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"