Posted on 10/14/2010 5:43:00 PM PDT by jerry557
Kerfye Pierre's thanks for helping out victims of Haiti's earthquake? A $35,000 bill from T-Mobile.
Pierre tells CNN that she racked up about $35,000 while texting family and friends from Haiti with the news that she had just survived the devastating earthquake. T-Mobile offered to waive voice plans for Americans who were volunteering there after the crippling disaster, but Pierre said she didn't realize that the waiver didn't include text messages.
The company has now reduced her bill to approximately $5,000, but Pierre says she still can't pay that.
"I would be OK to pay for it if everything was disclosed, and I knew upfront that, if I used this part of the service, I would be charged," she told CNN. "But I did not know."
The FCC voted today to explore the issue of cell-phone-bill sticker shock, and will decide whether cell-phone companies must do a better job of informing customers when they are about to be charged extra for text and data charges. The FCC may rule that companies must send text-message alerts to customers when they reach their plan's data limits or are incurring roaming charges.
According to the Washington Post, two Republican commissioners voiced concerns that the rules could raise costs for the cell-phone companies -- and that such costs would then translate into more expensive plans for customers.
An FCC survey found that millions of Americans have suffered some kind of "bill shock" from a cell-phone bill. Film publicist Reid Rosefelt, for instance, went to Canada for five days for a film festival and returned with a $1,723 bill from AT&T. He said he received no email or text telling him he was using excessive data on his phone, and that he didn't know how to turn off data services to avoid the charges.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
They should do a better job, but the other question is why they are charging such insane rates in the first place. T Mobile is particularly bad, IMHO.
We need more competition in this market.
Text messaging is the biggest ripoff ever conceived. (Well, after Social Security and Global Warming.) Voice connections are one or two cents a minute, and you get several kHz of bandwidth, so you could transmit about a thousand bytes, times sixty seconds, or 60 kB, for one or two pennies. In contrast, a message comprising two dozen bytes, costs twenty five cents, or one cent per byte - 60,000 times more expensive.
Just say no to text messaging.
“We need more competition in this market.”
Only so many towers exist. And the current political (zoning and NIMBY) climate makes erecting new towers almost impossible.
This is incredible.
When I was last in the USA, I was the first BellSouth agent in my county. I knew mobile service was expensive then, and all applicants had to pass a credit check just to get on the system, but I sold out and left to USA for good in 2004.
In central Europe, my first foreign home, people text all day long for very little money, and here in the Philippines, young girls spend their entire day texting each other, and these girls barely have 2 pesos (2 cents) to rub together.
It is rare to find anyone here between age 15 and 40 that does not have a hand held, pecking away all day.
Is this a great country, or what?
Is this a great country, or what?”
I would suspect there are many of us around from the pre-cellphone, pre-texting era who are living, walking, breathing testimony to the fact that it is quite possible to survive quite well without being co-dependent on either or both.
Doesn’t anyone read the fine print anymore?
Caveat emptor.
That’s not how they operate. Any money even stealing money from pay per whatever phones which seems to contradict what their commercials say.
At $1.00 per text message, she would have to send or receive an average of one text message every 1.24 minutes, every minute of every hour of every day for 30 days.
I’m on dial-up right now and I own no cell phone. Upstairs is a rotary phone from the 1940’s.
Color me plugged in, aware, and fiscally solvent.
Yeah; I'm one of THOSE, but I like the cellphone that I PAY FOR; but I refuse TM's and don't care for that. Email works good, though.
Verizon sends me a free text message whenever I’m about to hit my free limits and start getting charged for overages. In my more than 12 years with Verizon, I’ve never had a billing problem they didn’t correct, and I’ve only had a handful of those.
Prepaid unlimited talk and text is widely available for under $45/mo. The same idiots that experience cell-bill shock are the same ones that brought on the foreclosure crisis.
Folks really should read the fine print.
Network overhead between your phone and the tower is way more than the 160 characters you are allowed per text message. Unless you’re attaching large media files which only certain phones allow, text-only messages should be free. It’s really just noise on the carrier’s capacity and free money for the carrier.
There is LOTS of fine print. Everything you touch these days has some corporate lawyer posted pages and pages of fine print on it.
Screw all the fine print, just tell us the deal is in plain English. Fine print is no more that “depends on what the meaning of IS is”.
The real issue here is international calling. Phone calls that initiate from outside the U.S. are charged and regulated by that country, not American phone companies. Ever tried to make a phone call from Mexico while on vacation? The cost is outrageous but it isn’t the American phone company that came up with the rates. It’s the Mexican phone company that chose them. Wouldn’t shock me at all if Haiti’s are just as bad.
I really don’t know what texting rates are because I’m all thumbs and can speak a lot faster than I can type. But I don’t doubt that those rates are excessive too, and probably even worse when they originate from Haiti or Mexico or anywhere outside the U.S.
Ha !
Count me in too. I do have high speed internet so my landline phone is included. I do not own a cell phone. My husband’s company offered unlimited long distance, unlimited text for everyone in the family for $40 a month.
I didn’t get it. I can’t justify spending money on something I don’t need. I don’t know anyone here anyway.
I use Verizon pre-paid because I only really have it for travel. I have used it twice when I had car trouble on the road. I also have AAA and with the two, I have never been more than 30 minutes late on a 200 mile trip. LOL!...but true.
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