Posted on 02/24/2009 5:01:27 AM PST by MyTwoCopperCoins
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]
After hearing of the $28K charge, the transmission company doubled it as punishment for watching the Bears and Lions.
$300 to watch a Bears-Lions game on a laptop?
Forget about the original charge. People are nuts.
You couldn’t pay me $300 to watch a Bears & Lions game!............
You couldn’t pay me $300 to watch a Bears & Lions game!............
Hey! He was from Illinois, the state of the brain dead...where the government of corruption originated.
I wouldn’t pay $300 to watch the superbowl played by the women of victoria’s secret.
Overseas trips are a great time to get away from the computer and the news.
If somebody sent out a wireless data connection signal without requiring a log-on with notification that it would incur a charge, that's their problem and they need to eat the costs.
(If this guy can be proven to have deliberately cracked into a pay-per-use data channel, then by all means throw the book at him. The key words are "proven" and "deliberately".)
If you subscribe to interntional roaming on your cellphone, you aren’t charged international rates until you start using the phone on a foreign signal. Perhaps in this article, the data card picked up the ship’s satellite-to-wireless signals.
Bears and Lions?... NO
Bears and anyone?...NO
Lions and anyone?...NO
The women of Victoria's Secret?...ABSOLUTELY!!!
most nfl games can be seen for free on www.justin.tv
they also have a free 24 hour a day mst3k channel.
It's not as if the eventual outcome was in doubt.
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