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~snort~
You would think people would check costs before using a phone out of the country.
Those evil Corporations! Cell phone use should be a right! I never had a Cell Phone Corporation tell me that international rates would be different than my home country rates (albeit I hate my Country) /s
Can this rate as, “Too stupid to have a cell phone?”.
While on the Olympic Peninsula, I got a text from Verizon telling me I was roaming on a Canadian data plan. I was still in the US, but on Hurricane Ridge, so maybe I was picking up a signal from Victoria, BC. I had no data service in Olympic. Without that text, I wouldn’t have known I was ‘roaming’.
Worst that can happen is you burn up all your minutes and have to buy more.
Couldn’t she just get a baby sitter?
It'd be interesting to know the real costs of providing such service and which corporations have prices set well above costs.
I worked for T-mobile a few years back, and during that time I handled close to 40,000 calls (give or take). Some of the calls that i took were ridiculous. I can honestly say that the efforts made to scam customers were only matched by the scams many customers attempted to take money from the company. I have worked for 3 different cell phone companies over the years, and none of them was perfect. But I’ll never forget some of the $5,000 dollar T-mobile bills I’ve seen, and the stories behind them.
One man went to a trip in Europe, and had his cell phone with him. He knew he would be charged the international rate, so he declined/rejected each and every call that came to him. He was charged not only the excessive international rate (about 15X more than it would have cost him to add a $10 or so international calling feature), but he was also charged several dollars per call in “call forwarding” since technically the calls is “forwarded” back to the U.S.
If he would have added a “calling” feature and answered the calls (and susequently hung up), he would have spent something like $50. But instead after all the charges were added up it was something like $1,000, for NOT answering the call. There are one time (one month) per year or life of account rerate fixes, but this type of stuff is common. It’s wacky some of the ingenius garbage that cell phone companies can come up with.
I should add that I have seen charges that were similar with landline companies as well, but nothing on the order of the 3 cell companies that I worked for (T-Mobile was by far the worst).
It’s crucial when you travel to Canada to make sure you set your Data setting to “Off”, because even if you don’t think you’re using it, there is stuff getting downloaded without you even knowing it.
I’d hope there’s an applet somewhere that lets you easily get at and see your current phone bill, and lets you put caps on overage.
I could understand why a non-hearing customer would need to text a lot, but why would a non-hearing customer want to download videos? Without a sound track videos are almost useless.
Hey one of my jobs where I work is to manage cell phone and data card use. I always have the plans changed to International when anyone travels outside our borders. When I travel personally all devices are set to only use WiFi. Never have I gotten an extra charge. But to be fair I am probably a lot more savvy than the average welfare idiot with a cell phone.
Sounds to me like T-Mobile is doing the right thing here. I am sure it costs T-mobile something to have a foreign service provider allow TM customers to use their network. T-Mobile recognized that $200k is ridiculous and brought the bill more into line with their costs.
Further, these guys were in Canada and even a little bit of common sense would tell you to check on the details of your phone plan before downloading videos and other such non-essentials while in another country. A $2,500 fool tax spread over 6 months also seems appropriate.
That’s 71 texts per day per brother That’s 4.5 per hour EACH per 16 hour day
Take the phones away from those two brothers, give each two hand flags and a cheat sheet on semaphore.
I now use Straight Talk. Prepaid, $45 bucks per month for unlimited voice, data, text and photos. You’re on the Verizon network, but not dealing with Verizon or their contracts. It’s great. I’d recommend it to anyone.