Cellular Scare -- byte caps extreme

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Bob Frankston [bob37-2 () bobf frankston com]
Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2008 1:50 PM
To: David Farber; 'ip'
Cc: dewayne () warpspeed com
Subject: Cellular Scare -- byte caps extreme

Speaking of byte caps and the cost of betting against the house …

I've been trying to straighten out my Verizon cellular account including getting data plan charges for suspended 
numbers. One accidental by-product was that they removed the data plan from my son’s phone. I noticed it only when 
there was a $530 fee for data usage in place for the $45 fee. He’s not a heavy user – but it doesn’t take much browsing 
or use of Google/Microsoft maps to reach 30 Megabytes. Of course I should be thankful that he wasn’t browsing using SMS 
at a $0.001 per byte (it’s actually more) it would have been 3e7*1e-3 or $30,000.

And that’s with relatively light usage. I’ve run up gigabytes using cellular “broadband” – after all that’s their own 
description. Admittedly if you’re lucky enough to see some of the usage before the end of the month the house (Verizon) 
will allow you to backdate your bet to the beginning of the billing period but that means you’re obsessively checking 
the usage because you get no warning and isn’t easy to find the current usage unless you look in just the right place 
and often not even then.

These is an extreme form of lottery pricing and charging by the intention of the bits.

I’ve also had the cliff effect of one of my sons talking a lot on the cell phone and tripping past the equivalent of 
the cellular byte cap – the minutes you bet you’ll need only to find the price goes up from say $100 to $1000 in a 
month.

What kind of marketplace can sustain such arbitrary and capricious variations in pricing? What kind of users would 
accept such being treated this way? What kind of citizenry would ask their government to protect such a business model?

But the carriers aren’t dumb – as long as they keep us focused on the termination fees we won’t notice the money being 
lifted out of the other pockets.

http://www.frankston.com/public



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