World’s first $85,000 mobile phone bill
Here's a story that made me sit up and take notice. Canadian Piotr Staniaszek has just been sent a bill by his mobile phone company, Bell Mobility, for a whopping $85,000!! How, you might be wondering, can anyone run up a bill so large? The simple answer, unfortunately, is data.
Data transfer in Canada is not quite as cheap as it is in Europe. For example, while I have an unlimited HSDPA connection for the flat rate fee of £27 a month, irrespective of whether I'm downloading data onto my phone or using my phone as a modem, in Canada, things are, well, slightly more expensive!
Unfortunately, Staniaszek didn't realise this, and so he used his phone as a modem, and downloaded several gigs' worth of content. What he didn't know was that his mobile operator was charging him by the byte!!
To be fair to Staniaszek, he'd taken out a $10 a month unlimited mobile data plan with Bell Mobility, which he assumed meant he could download an unlimited amount of data via his mobile - not an unreasonable assumption.
You'd also think that a mobile phone company might alert someone once their bill had reached $1,000 - let alone $85,000! In a "goodwill gesture", Bell Mobility did reduce the bill to $3,243, but this only highlights how expensive mobile data is in Canada. $3,243 matches the best data plan available for using mobile phones as a modem.
$3,243 for an unlimited data plan! Thank god I'm in the UK with T-Mobile and their £27 a month unlimited data plan! I must admit when I first read this, my heart suddenly leapt, as I've been using my Nokia E90 as a modem for the past month. What if I too had unwittingly been running up a mortgage-sized bill by ferociously blogging (yes, I am a ferocious blogger ;)
Fortunately, I'm safe - T-Mobile charge you £27 per month for 3GB of data, which I'm unlikely to reach simply by browsing the Web and the blogosphere.
Still, makes me realise how lucky I am being in a country with such a great mobile data tariff. I may be envious of the Koreans and their uber-phones, but at least I can afford to use the Internet via my mobile phone.
It does make you wonder whether the Canadians (and the US, too, for that matter) are shooting themselves in the foot, though, as with tariffs that high, they're harming the mobile data market, and making themselves seriously behind the rest of the world.
[Source: BBC News]
