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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.'
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."
... just sayin
Every one of their new plans they have unlimited data including international.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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 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.
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.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.