Man charged $28,000 for using data card, Slingbox to watch football game

While waiting for a Caribbean cruise liner to set sail from the Port of Miami last November, a Chicago native with an AT&T wireless card and Slingbox decided to catch the Bears vs. Lions football game on his laptop. The end result? A $28,067.31 bill from for international data charges, despite the ship never leaving the harbor. Apparently the card was picking up a signal it shouldn't have, and while the bill was eventually dropped to $290.65 after a considerable number of calls to customer service, let that be a warning to mobile users traveling on the fringe of international roaming areas -- and in case you were wondering, the Bears ended up winning 27 to 23.

[Via The Register]

[John @ Feb 24th 2009 7:35AM]

that title makes it sound like this was some sort of fine for illegal activities rather than roaming gone bad

[MarZau @ Feb 24th 2009 1:24PM]

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.

[cwj @ Feb 24th 2009 7:37AM]

Moral of the story: always look before you link.

[Adam @ Feb 24th 2009 7:44AM]

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"?

[malexandria @ Feb 24th 2009 8:26AM]

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.

[konshuss @ Feb 24th 2009 7:47AM]

Even after all this it cost him 300 bucks to watch a football game? I'll stick with ganking unsecured wifi.

[Barbaric @ Feb 24th 2009 9:07AM]

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.

[loosely_coupled @ Feb 25th 2009 1:16AM]

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..

[SkaKid @ Feb 24th 2009 12:25PM]

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.

[Tarnation @ Feb 24th 2009 8:12AM]

You would assume that the ship had some TV's or something with a satellite hookup for television viewing.

[Barbaric @ Feb 24th 2009 9:13AM]

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!

[pdubz99 @ Feb 24th 2009 8:15AM]

um... there wasn't anyone wondering because the lions finished 0-16.

[Finnschi @ Feb 24th 2009 8:25AM]

GO DETROIT!! :P

[alexmueller @ Feb 24th 2009 11:58AM]

Ya really, and that guy should have assumed the bears would win.

[Epignosis @ Feb 24th 2009 8:18AM]

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.

[Peter @ Feb 24th 2009 8:22AM]

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).

[hexydes @ Feb 24th 2009 8:23AM]

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.

[majortom1981 @ Feb 24th 2009 8:49AM]

The thing is this wasnt atts fault. He was prob using the cruise ships connection . Cruise ship fees are very expensive.

[Yankees368 @ Feb 24th 2009 8:25AM]

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.

[krische @ Feb 24th 2009 9:11AM]

Cruise ships have their own cell towers on board so people can get signal at sea. They are classified as international roaming.

[BigReg @ Feb 24th 2009 9:25AM]

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).

[jakem @ Feb 24th 2009 8:29AM]

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.

[Ken @ Feb 24th 2009 9:44AM]

if 3 supports roaming in the US I see no reason why I wouldn't sign a contract with them.

[MotU @ Feb 24th 2009 8:34AM]

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).

[AlekZander @ Feb 24th 2009 8:43AM]

This is why we Americans tend not to pay attention when Europeans start yammering on about how horrible our service providers are.

[Olu O @ Feb 24th 2009 8:38AM]

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."

[zunq @ Feb 24th 2009 8:42PM]

"da fuk? I didn't kno dey makem dis small. fo shiz"

[Russell Center @ Feb 24th 2009 8:58AM]

Wait. What!? He spent $290.65 to watch a LIONS game!?

[shalegac @ Feb 24th 2009 9:08AM]

The big news here was the fact that the Lions didn't loose by 35.

[Loban @ Feb 24th 2009 9:23AM]

True, I remember that game. The Lions almost won it, that would have been embarrassing (I'm a Bears fan).

[Dwayne Hamson @ Feb 24th 2009 9:23AM]

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.

[Jamar @ Feb 24th 2009 9:26AM]

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.

[Jamar @ Feb 24th 2009 9:38AM]

That was supposed to be a reply, dammit! I thought the bugs were supposed to be ironed out already.

[onlineforen @ Feb 24th 2009 9:57AM]

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!

[stig @ Feb 24th 2009 3:30PM]

Too many bars in too many places!

[sezen @ Feb 24th 2009 10:56AM]

I wonder if they tried to make the argument that the Port of Miami is essentially international...

[kimberly @ Feb 24th 2009 11:06AM]

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.

[why not the LS2LS7? @ Feb 24th 2009 12:14PM]

He was in port in the US, it shouldn't have been roaming.

[loosely_coupled @ Feb 25th 2009 1:21AM]

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...

[Jamar @ Feb 25th 2009 7:36AM]

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.

[therpham @ Feb 24th 2009 11:20AM]

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.

[Miguel @ Feb 24th 2009 11:29AM]

Should of got NFL Mobile from Sprint........

[brahmachari99 @ Feb 24th 2009 12:51PM]

Should of? What does that mean?

[Chris @ Feb 24th 2009 1:01PM]

"Should of..." means he "should have" gotten a better education then maybe he wouldn't be choosing Sprint as his carrier ;)

[brahmachari99 @ Feb 24th 2009 12:52PM]

It'd be funnier if it were a Lions fan who did this.

[Chris @ Feb 24th 2009 12:57PM]

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.

[Ian @ Feb 24th 2009 12:56PM]

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.

[k-y @ Feb 24th 2009 2:22PM]

Should have found a hotspot and used WiFi

[Squid7085 @ Feb 24th 2009 2:39PM]

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!

[reuben @ Feb 24th 2009 2:57PM]

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...