Man charged $28,000 for using data card, Slingbox to watch football game
By Ross Miller 
posted Feb 24th 2009 7:31AM
posted Feb 24th 2009 7:31AM
[Via The Register]
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that title makes it sound like this was some sort of fine for illegal activities rather than roaming gone bad
Maybe the title should have said: company takes guy for 28k in data costs then retracts because of potentially bad PR, being that concise would have got far less clicks.
Moral of the story: always look before you link.
When you use those types of data cards on your laptop, are you able to see what network you are connected to? Would he have been able to see that was "internationally roaming"?
This is why I have an issue with these broadband plans and caps. The software doesn't adequately tell you
where you are connecting to, how much you are downloading/uploading, etc. I tested AT&T for two days and
ended up with a $5,000 bill (everything was spam, and failed downloads of podcasts). Took me a week and lots of calls to get that knocked down to $120. It's why, as long as they have these caps, I'll never get a data card plan - even though, I really could
use one.
Even after all this it cost him 300 bucks to watch a football game? I'll stick with ganking unsecured wifi.
I thought the same at first. But i read the articles, & the $290 was his total monthly bill. I guess thats not so bad... if hes got a data plan, & 5 additional lines i guess. My AT&T bill is about $150 a month for 4 lines, with unlimited data on two ($15 unlimited, not tethered or dedicated data cards.)
so the bill makes sense, poor sense, but sense. I wouldn't pay a $300 phone bill every month.
NO such thing as unlimited.. It's 5GB, and in particular Verizon wireless charges an ASS LOAD for overages! I believe its like $25 per GIG or something..
I know it said he was a Chi-town native, but he was obliviously not a Lions fan because nobody from the Detroit area would be that desperate to see the FAIL that is the lions.
You would assume that the ship had some TV's or something with a satellite hookup for television viewing.
OH no... I would much rather watch the game on my laptop than on one of the 500 50" HD tv's around.
Or maybe he couldn't afford a cruise line with tv service... hes shellin out 300 a month for data. And those explosive golf clubs aren't cheap either!
cause maybe he's really using his laptop to remotely control the ship, and get ransom money, but that deaf girl & Sandra Bullock keep ruining his plans!
um... there wasn't anyone wondering because the lions finished 0-16.
GO DETROIT!! :P
Ya really, and that guy should have assumed the bears would win.
At first I thought, WoW! The man earned 27,776.66$ only for watching a football game and making a couple of of phone calls. But then I thought, maybe the phone calls also were transfered on the wrong signal, cost him 30K$. Who knows.
I think I know how this happened. I was on a cruise in January, and took the time to read the cruise line's brochure.
Many of the cruise lines are starting to offer wireless on board (at stratospheric international roaming rates). They are *supposed* to enable the onboard network only when out of range of US nework connectivity, but you can see how the temptation to "forget" would result in a huge profit.
Of course, the cell providers don't go out of their way to indicate in any way whether you're on a roaming network or not...because they have roaming agreements with many small providers and normally, this isn't an issue (and everybody makes money when you make a mistake).
Despite the fee being dropped, you have to honestly ask yourself, how much did it cost the cell company to stream that data? I can't muse on an exact figure, but I have to imagine it's somewhere in the single-digits, at most.
This is why people hate cell providers. They do it because they can.
The thing is this wasnt atts fault. He was prob using the cruise ships connection . Cruise ship fees are very expensive.
Are you telling me that somehow, this man pulled in an international signal IN Miami, and used slingbox? Watching Slingbox takes considerable bandwidth, and his signal would have to have been top notch. Something does not make sense here. There is no way a 3G signal makes it more that a few miles, even more so within a city.
Cruise ships have their own cell towers on board so people can get signal at sea. They are classified as international roaming.
Cruise ships have their own cellular systems, true, but my experience across a number of ships and cruise lines is that the BEST data connection I've seen was GPRS. So this story sounds very fishy. There was no way he watching the game via Slingbox over GPRS.
Also, if you have an outside cabin or a balcony, 3G works perfectly from Miami and Ft. Lauderdale onboard the ship. Inside cabins are much more dicey and it really depends on where its located exactly (lots of steel to block the signal).
I'm with 3 here in the UK and can use my mobile phone/USB modem at no extra cost in any other country that 3 operates in. For instance, I'm off to Rome this weekend and the cost of internet access will just come out of my normal £7/month contract and the cost of mobile calls/text messages to any other UK phone comes out of my phone contract. I can also use Skype free.
International Roaming is a fraud and the sooner it's eliminated the better. If more companies followed 3's life would be a lot easier and cheaper for travellers.
if 3 supports roaming in the US I see no reason why I wouldn't sign a contract with them.
Not so common in the US perhaps, but in Europe this happens all the time! Then even something as simple as mobile phone calls can add up to a pile of money.
I am one of many who commute to work in a nother country. Solution - never download data in another country, keep two phones, set phone/card to manually select net (this way it will say "no service" as soon as you dont have access to your home country net).
This is why we Americans tend not to pay attention when Europeans start yammering on about how horrible our service providers are.
P. Diddy's like "Woooow, it's a dollar bill. I've heard about these but I havn't seen one until now. My god ... they're worth so little I don't know what to do with it."
"da fuk? I didn't kno dey makem dis small. fo shiz"
Wait. What!? He spent $290.65 to watch a LIONS game!?
The big news here was the fact that the Lions didn't loose by 35.
True, I remember that game. The Lions almost won it, that would have been embarrassing (I'm a Bears fan).
why doesn't my slingbox UI look like Diddy's...?
@konshuss- nice use of "gank"; NWA called from 1989 and they want their....wait, they don't care.
Ahhh, lucky you. I also have a 3 but in Hong Kong. Apparently they're not as kind there; roaming in the same country costs (exchanged from HK$) £1.50/minute and 11p/KB. And no reciprocal inter-3 roaming- if I go to the UK I pay out the rear like any non-3 user roaming in.
That was supposed to be a reply, dammit! I thought the bugs were supposed to be ironed out already.
I liked that line:
“The Fixer (who's a former Cheesehead) was about to say we could see paying $27,000 to watch a Packers game, but . . . oh well, on to your problem. This was truly one of the weirdest letters we've ever received.”
GO PACKERS!
Too many bars in too many places!
I wonder if they tried to make the argument that the Port of Miami is essentially international...
The cruise lines have the money to build decent cell towers on their ships and refuse to offer discounted roaming like other carriers that provide roaming coverage for US carriers. at&t is not making any money off people roaming and for these other carriers it's pure profit. The cruise lines charge $2.49 a minute for calls and .02 per kb for data. You can always see what carrier you are on with your phone and with internet. I work for at&t and I always make sure people know that they will get billed for EVERYTHING while roaming. I end up scaring people into leaving their phones home a lot of he time. at&t earns nothing while you roam and when we adjist the charges we are taking money from at&t not the other carrier. They send us the bill when you roam and it's added to your bill.
He was in port in the US, it shouldn't have been roaming.
that ".02 per KB" is the kind of BS that Verizon, AT&T and others advertise as their data rate for non-data plan phones.. Obviously the average person can't calculate what that cost would be for an average browsing session.
.02 per KB = 20 per MB aka nearly $10 just to download the frontpage of nytimes.com. Large complex websites have huge webpage sizes easily in the hundreds of kilobytes...
OMG. I pay less than half that on int'l roaming with my China Mobile SIM. No matter where I go, they've fixed data at a single rate (about US$6-7/MB) and they give me free incoming texts and the local per-use rate to text back to China.
I really hope that within 5-10 years the ubiquity of wireless communication will kill the ridiculous prices we've had to put up with (at least in the US) for so very long. What's probably actually going to happen is that all the carriers will merge and charge $10 for a text message.
Should of got NFL Mobile from Sprint........
Should of? What does that mean?
"Should of..." means he "should have" gotten a better education then maybe he wouldn't be choosing Sprint as his carrier ;)
It'd be funnier if it were a Lions fan who did this.
I have an AT&T card to use when I travel for work and their "Communications Manager" lets you set preferences, including domestic and international data roaming. I didn't change anything with mine and went in to check to see what the default settings were. They're at "prompt" meaning if its trying to access a non AT&T domestic network it'll ask you what you want to do. So at some point he either changed his settings to automatically connect or clicked "ok" when warned that it was an international connection. If the guy was smart enough to hook up a Slingbox and connection card he should be smart enough to know he was roaming using international data. I'd say he's pretty lucky AT&T isn't making him pay the entire bill.
i still say he should have just recorded it at home.. i mean he was on a cruise he should be on vacation. o well i guess i'll give it to him because he was just sitting at port.
Should have found a hotspot and used WiFi
Maybe if AT&T would show us True Alpha Tags this would have never happened. When his Data card said something about being connected to "Carnival Wireless" or whatever, he might have moved to solve the problem. Even a network selection menu for heavens sake!
had this happen all the time in the Virgin Islands....I'd be on a US rock and pick up a signal from a British tower, and get dinged the next bill--customer service was familiar with the problem and would always drop the intl roaming charges if you just told them you never left the country...
You're absolutely right, the towers from Jost Van Dyke or Tortola would reach to the East side of St. Thomas, and sometimes even shower the whole of St. John.
Now, it doesn't happen half as much as it used to...
Especially since we have stronger 3G signals now :D
Da' Bears.
From my own bloody experience that happened two weeks ago in Key West, FL, I can tell it is TOTALLY ATT's fault, at least their terrible network infrastructure and system.
I was on a cruise ship too. The ship arrived in Key West, Florida (United States, right?) and docked there for that whole day. Then my Iphone changed back to "AT&T 3G" from "Carrier At Sea" . I was very careful for not getting a bite by AT&T, so I restarted my phone before I started to use it. While I used my phone both in the town on the ship, I cheked frequently to make sure it was 100% on AT&T domestic towers (as regular customer, I can only tell that by its label aside the signal bars, right?).
Anyway, after I got home, I was informed that I had about $850 international roaming data charges!!!! what a ridiculous wireless provider? I can not imagine how local people in Key West to get a iphone in Key West, FL.
The bottom line, as you may know, iphone has a feature to let you turn off roaming. That feature in my phone is absolutlly always off no matter what. So it shouldn't let me use the data if the phone was picking up any signals other than ATT's domestic ones.
Anyway, hours calling to their customer service (5 times) finally solved the issue, and it was really painful to prove that my phone was not on a international tower. Luckily, I made a phone call to my home that day. They can tell that was made in Key West, FL.
BTW, their customer representative varies a lot in term of helping their customer. the latter ones were really good and helpful to me. However, the first one was extremely mean to me. He wasn't willing to listen to me and just asked me to pay the money, otherwise to disconeect my data. I hate that guy and he shouldn't be there at all.
Jut be alert when you get close to a cruise ship and suddenly want to your ATT cell phone!!!
What a heart attacking surprise that you can get from ATT, particullar after a wonderful trip!
LOL pdiddy is looking at that 1 dollar bill in his stack of hundreds..like "how the hell you get in here? your type is unwanted round here"
I worked for a certain cell phone company and a person called in one time. According to them they were just sitting in port seeing somebody off and they were charged 4.99 per minute for connecting to its towers.