Something tells me there’ll be a whole lot of people very surprised when their AT&T iPhone bills drop into the letterbox. For a start, it might not be the envelope you’re expecting but, like JustinTV’s Justine Ezarik, a great bloody box full of three hundred pages of itemised goodness. Or, alternatively, you might get another type of huge bill: $5,000 thanks to international data roaming charges, as Adam Aronson discovered.
Adam spent some time in the UK recently, taking his shiny iPhone with him of course, assuming his contract wasn’t set up for international data roaming. Unfortunately, AT&T work on a system of automatically enabling it if you’ve got a decent credit record (something Adam might not have for long if the carrier insists on him paying the full bill), so unwittingly he was paying two-cents a kilobyte.
“While I was in England I actually tried to access my account to find out how much data I was using and my account only showed “data not available”. $5k for something I had no idea I would be charged for, (let alone those exorbitant rates of $2cents per K!) and no way of checking my data consumption” Adam Aronson
He’s now hoping that AT&T take pity and wipe out the charge. Anyone else living in fear of hearing that heavy thud as their cellphone bill arrives?
He was dumb to ASSUME that he wouldn’t be billed for international roaming.
I checked with AT&T and they INSIST that I will NOT be charged while in Amsterdam if I don’t activate international roaming. Now I’m confused.
I thought you had to wait 3 months before they would even allow international roaming?
This is the second story of someone going to the UK and “not knowing how much data they were using” because they were looking online for their bill instead of just looking at the firiggin phone itself.
I think this is bogus since it reads almost exactly like the previous story.
And thus the reason why people by UNLOCKED phones and use SIM cards from the country they are traveling to. I mean god forbid you would want to buy an unlocked phone that costs less, has more features and can do more than an iPhone and can still roam the world with 0 extra charges.
AT&T recently charged me over $600 for roaming calls I never made! Many of these calls were physically imposible! Check out my story at:
http://muncyweb.blogspot.com/2007/08/another-at-blunder.html
READ MORE HERE…
hi i enjoyed the read