A few weeks ago, Anthony wrote:
Verizon has designed many of their phones to have easy-to-hit-by-accident buttons that connect you to the Internet using their “Get It Now” or other stupid services, and they charge you $1.99 for pushing that button, even if you cancel the action immediately.
Better yet, if you call to have them block your account from accessing online data, those buttons return a message from the Internet saying you can’t receive data, and they charge you $1.99 for that error message too.
Articles started surfacing last Friday about a 13-year-old California boy who racked up $22,000 in data charges after downloading nearly 1.4 million kilobytes of data shortly after his father added him to the family plan. The kicker is that the family didn’t even have at data plan, and as such were charged by the megabyte. After a sufficient amount of media coverage transpired, Verizon agreed to drop the charges.
h/t: npr.org and consumerist.com
So much for wear and tear recovery expenses on the Verizon network infrastructure. The friction 1.4 million kilobytes causes must be just plain enormous. All those wireless tubes wearing out could cause fire hazards.
It’s not just wear and tear on the tubes, imagine all the impact on the aether from that amount of data.
The aether’s physical properties were never meant to support this. It might invoke subatomic instability.
I just had to get $17 of mystery megabyte charges removed from my son’s account with Verizon. It is already the most expensive provider. This is very irritating.
But at least they don’t have Ben Stein as a spokesman.
I was a mid-level manager at VZW when this billing change came about. When I questioned the efficacy of billing people for hitting a button on accident I was told that I was not a team player and that I was sending the wrong message to the people that worked for me. It was clear to anyone who wanted to look that this would be an issue for customers, they just did not care.
I have a verizon phone, a samsung, and its operating system (whatever you call it) is pretty fucking lame. Definitely not intuitive design.
@pro-science: VZW is notorious for destroying the interfaces on the phones that they release. That Samsung that you have probably would have had a very nice, pleasant UI if it hadn’t come from Verizon. The rational is that they want a consistent UI across all their dumbphones and featurephones, but you would think that they’d make it something that wasn’t terrible.
I’m not one to defend Verizon by any measure, as my stepmother had to “fight” on the phone about getting some data billing charges dropped as no one on the family plan downloaded twilight ringtones and other crappy items, but I do have to say that the father screwed up by not telling and reenforcing to his son that he should not be downloading anything. Especially when they don’t have a data plan included.
“1.4 million kilobytes” might sound like a lot, perhaps even something worth $22,000 — but that’s 1.4 gigabytes, which would take about 4 minutes to transfer on my (very fast) 50 megabit cable internet connection.
Verizon’s (formerly “unlimited”) $50-60 data plans allow 5 gigabytes of transfer per month, in comparison.
Yep, you’re right, @9 – that’s chump change. I do about 500 gigs a month on my AT&T BlackBerry (lots of video).