Operators must get more proactive over data charges
Rating: $2,100 phone bills are counter-productive
by Tony Dennis
I knew it
would be tempting fate to write about the misfortune of a fellow hack
- Chris Anderson of Wired magazine – who apparently ran up a bill
of $2,100 using his iPhone in China.
This huge data tab wasn’t
created by surfing the net but by downloading emails every ten
minutes. Nonetheless, it is symptomatic of the attitude still taken
towards mobile data by operators and applies equally well to other data services besides email. The general
public hasn’t got a clue how much these things cost because operators
persist in pricing data in bundles of megabytes.
It’s not just the public who make such
mistakes. Welshman David Bromley ran up a £1,400 bill surfing
the net to follow a Liverpool game from Barbados in 2005. The big point was that
Bromley actually worked on Orange’s helpdesk. If he didn’t know how much it would cost, what
chance the rest of us, then?
Luckily for Mr Anderson, his operator
– AT&T – finally sent him a text warning him that he might be
facing a hefty bill.
I maintain that the operators are setting
these thresholds far too high. It should be possible to catch such
instances way before the bill necessitates a second mortgage.
Worse still, the operators seem to
already possess the necessary technology. Only today I received a
message from Orange saying, "We’ve reviewed your phone usage and
the great news is you are already on the best plan."
AT&T
claimed that if Mr Anderson had picked the correct tariff, his bill
would have been closer to $300. So why didn’t the company switch him when he’d
reached $299?
If operators are really serious about
pushing content and data services in general, then they’ve got to
become more proactive.
How many potential iPhone users on learning of Mr Anderson’s misfortune made a mental note not to surf unless
absolutely necessary?
Oh. In case you’re wondering what my
punishment was for gloating over Mr Anderson’s mistake - the awfully
nice people at 3 suddenly asked for my Nokia X-Series handset
back.
Right. Dennis, 100 lines for you. "I must not write any more
stories taking the Michael out of fellow journalists."
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