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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
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
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.
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 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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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.