Alberto is a guy who downloaded Wall-E and got billed $62,000 by his cellphone carrier, because he was in roaming. The guy was in Mexico when he downloaded and he told Clark Howard on his show about this.
Alberto downloaded the movie for his nephew because he wanted to watch it. Finally the company lowered the price to $17,000 after a complain, but still it’s a bit more expensive than $20, the price to rent the movie.
Check out the video to see what Alberto has to say.
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Guy billed $62,000 for downloading Wall-E
Posted on 24 April 2009 in News, Offbeat
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Was he on an unlimited data plan? Probably he got mislead, but why charge $17,000 for that, when the most likely charge to download a movie is like $600.
The guy tied up hundreds of megabits of bandwidth on his cell carrier was surprised when he got a big bill?
What a moron.
Oh sorry, did I say hundreds of megabits? I meant thousands.
Guy is billed $62000 because he was roaming and he is a moron? Ur a moron! I understand about the bandwidth but that is just ridiculous. This cell provider is raking him over the coals because he downloaded a movie for his nephew and you agree? $17000 is stupid. If the company is smart they will just drop it. Downloading a 700MB movie is not that big of a deal for a cell company considering millions of pictures are sent a day for no extra charge.
1) Cellular Internet connections are strictly for viewing entirely text-based websites and possibly IMing.
2) Unless you get an ‘unlimited’ (usually just a very high limit) data plan, you’re likely to pay somewhere around 5 cents per kilobyte of overage
3) he was roaming… in Mexico.
4) This guy obviously didn’t read his carrier’s TOS
We had a similar problem at work where someone had configured their business cell to act as a modem and had been downloading movies off of bittorrent. The data plan was 10MB per month and 5 cents per kb of overage. Needless to say, the guy no longer works with us.
NRen2k5, he hardly tied up thousands of megabits of bandwidth. The maximum transfer speed for 3G is usually about 2.4 megabits/sec which is pretty much nothing.
Also I might add, this guy is a douche. He should have known better, but it is still hardly fair billing him such an insane amount. Surely the could have cut the service off when it got to $1-2K or something…
It’s 2009 – They should have all the kinks worked out and bandwidth ahhhh phewy! He didn’t slow anything down.
It was a wireless data card for a laptop computer, so not meant for “viewing entirely text-based websites” (which websites, exactly, would those be? Even GMail has a *graphical* interface.) and “possibly IMing.” Cell companies are selling these as an alternative to finding wifi when you’re out and about, not as a stopgap measure to do limited work, but as a means to have freedom to do as you please online wherever you are, regardless of the wifi situation there.
So the problem wasn’t that he was using his data card as it was intended to be used, but that he was roaming and didn’t know the limits of his data plan. The data plan limits are kind of important, but I can understand people who don’t get the “how many bits in a byte” thing being confused it all. But the roaming is pretty easy to understand. I don’t know any U.S. company that doesn’t have you roaming expensively when you’re in Mexico or Canada without setting up a very pricey international plan. (I’m on Verizon and I’m expensively roaming in West Virginia, for pete’s sake, I wouldn’t think I would be free to use like at home when in *another country*.) There’s no excuse for him not thinking about roaming once he crossed the border.
Sorry for Alberto… but the company should ask first if you are sure about what you will download… we are in new age of tech so why the company did not make a waring asking if you are agree or not…