$25,000 cellphone data bill

Two Ottawa customers have been left reeling, and fuming, after receiving cellphone bills from Bell Canada for tens of thousands of dollars even though they believed they had "unlimited" Internet access on the devices.

Khalil Haddad, owner of an Ottawa salon, was charged $10,342 last month after his son used his phone to surf the web. Jennifer Rundle, an Ottawa hair stylist and student, was sent a $24,791 bill for similar reasons.

Both thought they were paying an extra fee for unlimited Internet access in their cellular plans and figured they would be protected from huge bills.

Ottawa Citizen - How to ring up a $25,000 cellphone bill - June 7, 2008

The Canadian cellphone providers, as I detailed in Rogers Vision has you uncovered, provide confusing and incomplete information about data services, information which even an IT specialist can't understand, let alone an average user.  They don't seem to have a level of support that can clearly answer direct technical questions.  They also provide zero tools in-phone to help you monitor and manage your data use.  There is no technical reason they couldn't provide real-time data and dollar counters, as well as alert, cap and disable.  There are reports they may deliberately limit the amount of info you can get on your phone so that you can't manage your data use effectively, which is even more scandalous.

If Rogers doesn't fix this for The Coming of the iPhone, there will be blood.

Comments

[Mobile Broadband Blog]

There was a similar case in the UK where a guy was billed over £30,000 (that's more than $60,000 USD) for downloading an episode of Prison Break and some MP3s whilst on holiday in Portugal. After negotiating with his service provider he eventually got the billed reduced to £227!

This surely highlights how out of touch mobile operators are when it comes to recognizing how their customers are actually using data services in the real world.