$62,000 in Wireless Roaming Charges for WALL-E Download

If you don’t travel very often, you might not be very sensitive to the data-roaming pricing problem that many of us have. A customer named Alberto learned the hard way: he called CNN after being billed $62,000 of wireless data charges by his provider. Yes, sixty two thousand! While it seems ill-advised to not plan for roaming charges when traveling abroad, it seems totally dishonest to not warn someone that their bills is going through some ridiculously abnormal charges. It’s not like computers can’t raise a red flag.

After a protest, the unnamed mobile provider has lowered its bill to $17000, saying that it just covers the cost of bandwidth. For one that would indicate that margins are 360%, secondly, we don’t believe for one second that it costs the carrier $17000 for about 1GB of bandwidth, even with roaming, as most “unlimited” plans go as high as 5GB for $30–$60/mo. What a bad lie.