Vacationing family hit with $10,000 movie bill...

[SidDithers]

"The kids were getting bored," Jason Gibson added. "So we decided to watch Netflix on my air-card on my laptop."

They enjoyed Shrek, Spiderman and Curious George movies.

However, when they returned home and their SaskTel bill arrived, Gibson was in for a surprise.

"It was over $10,000," he said and immediately called the phone company who told him the charge was for data use out of SaskTel's service area.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/story/2012/02/02/sk-movie-roaming-charges-120202.html


Careful with those data roaming charges. Sasktel was charging $6 / MB for data roaming. Three movies at ~600 MB each, and the kids racked up more than $10,000 in data charges.

Sasktel knocked the bill down to $1000.

For a grand, Gibson probably could have bought the three movies on Blu-Ray, a Blu-Ray player, and a 46" TV to watch them on.

Sid

[TwilightGardener]

1. Damn. Electronic babysitter bit him in the ass.

[MineralMan]

2. Funny. I wonder if that laptop has a DVD

drive? If so...

You can buy a portable DVD player for about $80, get your DVDs from Netflix, and there you go. My nephew has two of them - one for each kid. They live in the car, so they're always there for a trip of any distance. Keeps the kiddies from whining, I suppose.

[hobbit709]

3. That's what I was thinking too.

could have bought all three of those movies for under $50.

[SidDithers]

4. Bet that's what happens next time...

Sid

[HillWilliam]

5. I seldom go on the road any more but when I do

I rip a few of my favorite movies down to disk and watch them on my laptop or tablet. The TV fare in hotels is pretty bad but not bad enough to shell out for either roaming charges or PPV. I can watch Farscape or Planet Earth until the cows come home and be perfectly happy.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

19. I have a ton of TV shows (ones that I've heard about but no longer

have cable access) downloaded from iTunes to my computer and iPad, so that's what I rely on while traveling.

My iPad served as a one-stop library and TV station in the evenings when I was in Cuba--where there was no wi-fi or broadband, only hard-to-find dial-up. I therefore had to maintain e-mail silence, but I could read my eBooks and catch up on TV shows.

TV shows on the iPad (or computer) are great for long plane flights, too, since I've had too many experiences in which I didn't want to watch any of the airline's offerings.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. The moral of this story: Do not use 3G/4G data outside your home country

The AT&T store clerk warned me about this when I bought my iPhone and happened to mention that I was going to Scandinavia in a few months. He mentioned a similar story in which a family went to Italy and let the kids play online games with a tethered iPhone in the evenings.

For the duration of the trip, therefore, I turned off 3G data and relied exclusively on wi-fi, which fortunately is easy to find in Scandinavia. In fact, one of the criteria I used in selecting hotels was the availability of free wi-fi.

[SidDithers]

9. You can often buy data packages for travel...

when I took my iPhone to New York (from Toronto) a couple of years ago, I bought one time international data package, I think it was $75 for 50 MB of data. Still expensive, but much better than $6 / MB.

Sid

[Hassin Bin Sober]

17. I remember people being hit for huge charges even when the phone were not "in use" ...

...but just turned on and updating itself.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. Yes, the sales clerk warned me about that, too

Fortunately, the iPhone has settings that allow you to turn off automatic updating. Really, I could do everything I needed to do with wi-fi.

[CanSocDem]

7. Sounds like Sasktel.

Since the election of the free enterprise government of Brad Wall, all of our sacred publicly owned corporations have been under attack. Short of selling them outright, the best way to turn them over to the free market is to make them so unpopular with the consumer that nobody will want to defend or protect them.

With all the competition in the telecommunications industry, Sasktel has staffed its' management class with vicious, rude and un-cooperative sales people that will do anything to destoy its business and historical goodwill.

Good OP, Sid....too bad we don't have a consumer advocate like Ralph Nader in our country.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

8. And here I was getting ready to DL the entire Steve Guttenberg film collection.

It would've been totally worth it!

[SidDithers]

10. Make sure you get Police Academy 4. It's awesome...

but you can skip Police Academy 3, it was shite.



Sid

[renate]

11. thanks for posting this

I wonder whether there's a way for the phone company to put a pop-up warning or something on the screen when people are out of their service area to warn them of the potential data charges. If there is, and they choose not to do it, I think that's horrible.

I'm totally paranoid about having something like this happen, so I've never watched a movie on my phone even in my own service area, but I bet you've saved somebody here from getting a bill like this. Thank you!

[pitohui]

25. yes there's a way, verizon gave me such a warning

the technology is there to warn people, because verizon gave me such a warning when i was in canada that roaming charges would be incurred

i then turned the phone off and was not billed for even the first few seconds i was using the phone in canada

the only reason a phone company would NOT warn the consumer is because they want to steal -- this phone company (while they know it would not stand up in court to bill the family 5 figures for this service) is still charging the family $1000

they are thieves, pure and simple

[pansypoo53219]

12. why not a fucking deck of cards or a board game.

we had no teevee or telephone at our family cottage. we spent hours + hours playing the official card game of WI-sheepshead. heck, after meals at grandma + grandpa, we played sheeps. tho we did play dominoes for the non sheeps players.

[TwilightGardener]

14. I do think it's sad that kids are watching three movies on what is supposed

to be a vacation. You can watch movies at home. Go play some mini golf. Visit a museum. Explore the desert. If you're in your hotel room at night, read, play a game, etc. There's life beyond electronics, at least when they're little. We've usually gone camping for family vacations, I don't know how my kids survived...

[Warren DeMontague]

22. And GET OFF MY LAWN!

Jesus. Judgmental, much?

[TwilightGardener]

24. Yeah, I am judgmental. Much.

[Warren DeMontague]

29. Clearly.

[pitohui]

27. it sounds like they were on vacation not in prison

most family vacations, the purpose is to bond and do things that everyone enjoys, let's leave playing poker for cigarettes to folks on death row

be that as it may, the games you played on vacation have no bearing on the fact that this telephone company out and out robbed this family

a simple warning should have popped up about the roaming charges, if verizon can give me such a warning, sasktel could have informed these folks

[Liberal_in_LA]

13. I used my cell phone on a trip to another state. When I returned, bill had $7 charges

for short calls to check my voice mail, total charges were about $200. I learned my lesson.
Phone company was willing to drop the charges if I signed another 2 year contract. I declined and paid the bill

[Hassin Bin Sober]

15. My neighbor got hit with a $7,000 dollar cell bill when in Mexico.

They were adopting a baby and got held up longer than expected. He used his cell to work remotely.

The strange thing is, he is an IT guy and one of the more tech savvy people I know. He thought he was covered until he got summoned to his company's accounts payable department.

[Liberal_in_LA]

16. wow

[Warren DeMontague]

23. You're going to BURN IN HELL

You should have spent that time whittling a model of mount rushmore out of driftwood. That's what we did when we were kids, whippersnappers!

[RZM]

20. I called AT&T last time I went to Canada

And made sure I understood exactly what settings to change on the phone so that this kind of thing wouldn't happen. You gotta be careful about this stuff.

[tawadi]

21. Wow

Those are good movies, but not that good.

[The Straight Story]

26. Make the phone companies notify a person each time their bill is going up $100

Or cut off usage after an amount - an easy thing to do. When I worked at Verizon they could (and did in some cases) black usage after a certain amount. But it means more money when you let things run over. This case is nothing new, would hear such stories from CS reps all the time on smoke breaks.

They don't want to inform consumers.

[pacalo]

28. AT&T notifies me whenever I reach 65% of my allowed usage for the month for my iPhone.

If I can be warned that I might have to pay $10/MB extra on my bill, it's outrageous that this man wasn't given a warning before he was charged so much.