Quite a few people I know including myself have been in this situation before. Somehow your wireless carrier sends you a bill that is anywhere from twice the regular amount to hundreds of times the regular amount. It happened to me once way back in the day when I had a 1MB T-Zones (remember that?) data plan on T-Mobile. My cousin borrowed my phone for 3 days while in town and racked up over 25mb of data usage. One would think that would mean just 25 times the $5 a megabyte plan. Little did I know it added $300+ of overage charges to my $70/month regular plan.
This is not close to being as extreme as other cases where bills are in the thousands of dollars but the FCC has decided it will probably have to step in. (PDF Link) In Europe there are similar rules dubbed “bill shock rules.” It looks like carriers will have to start doing a better job of notifying customers of their usage before the end of the month. This includes voice and data usage.
What do you think? Would better tools and alerts to monitor your families cellphone usage help?
(picture courtesy of Intomobile)
DavidB ( View Profile) - Posts: