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Woman Faces $9,100 Verizon Bill For Data She Says She Didn't Use (dslreports.com)
A Verizon Wireless customer says she received a bill of $9,100 for hundreds of gigabytes of data usage which never consumed. The woman told the Cleveland Plain Dealer she was on Verizon's 4GB shared data plan, and like any normal person, the bill of $8,535 from Verizon for consuming 569GB of data in a matter of few days doesn't compute well with her. The problem, as DSLR reports, is that when she tried to find out what caused the data usage, Verizon website told her "the activity you are trying to perform is currently unavailable. Please try again later." She couldn't and switched to T-Mobile, after which Verizon charged her a penalty of $600.
In order to rack up ~600GB of data usage in 10 days she would have had to be watching full HD video (~3GB/h) every hour of every day.
Of course that highly unlikely. And it's also highly unlikely it was an unattended device. Amazon, like other streaming providers, requires user interaction after every couple streams to prevent an unattended device from streaming data endlessly.
Additionally, on a small mobile device, Amazon/netflix/etc will not send a full HD stream (3GB/h) but rather a smaller resolution stream suitable for the device (full HD would be utterly useless and just a waste for everyone) and at a small fraction of the full HD bitrate. We're talking a couple hundred KB/s throughput or about 1GB/hour.
So the Amazon excuse it, at best, paper thin. It's a billing error.