The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet" | Hacker News Reader

The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"

projectgus.com

60 pointsangusgr20 comments

This whole model of "go over and we'll make you sorry, sunshine" is terrible for innovation. It encourages tentative, cautious use of services that could be more valuable if they were used without fear of financial punishment.

If you must ration throughput, a much better model is one that drops its bandwidth after hitting a cap. Though nothing compares to actually upgrading your network so you don't have to grudgingly provision resources like some kind of Dickens villain.

I had the Telstra 60GB plan up until they upgraded them about a month ago, because of the excess usage charge you would have to try and stop a safe distance from your cap, never getting the full 60GB, it would also lag behind on updating, although not as much, up to about 12 hours I think.

They also have a tendency to list some of your usage on the next day when it was used before midnight. Really annoying when your using your plan up on the last day, then some of that gets transferred to the next month.

This reminds of me how Three Mobile in Australia drops back to Telstra when roaming. This is by default and the user is none the wiser (unless they had the knowledge to turn off roaming).

I think every person I know who has a Three phone used an amount of data in their first month whilst roaming and had a $100+ excess usage charge (often much higher).

I'm sure it's all spelled out to them upon purchasing, but it's not clear and your average user has no idea what roaming is.

My old 3 phone used to constantly roam in 3's own broadband area. Ka-ching! Of the VHA brands Vodafone is the better of the two.

I registered a complaint with the ACCC with this a few years ago - they kept it on file, but couldn't really do much until there was a flood over epic bills (and they admitted it was hard for them to understand what the likelihood of this sort of thing happening, but they did appreciate it was unsavoury).

Imagine if this was combined with the iPhone worm from a few months back. It'd essenially pingflood all phones exposed on the telco networks and screw thousands of people in excess changes without them even knowing something was going on.

This worries me greatly. (puts iPhone on WiFi mode)

I didn't put this in the blog post, but hypothetically speaking you would not even need a worm.

A person would need an ISP account where you don't get limited on uploads (like Internode, or most non-Australian ISPs, for instance.)

A person would need to spoof the ping return address, so the ping never comes back to them. Or spoof a UDP stream where the ICMP port unreachable never comes back (or don't spoof it, and put up with 32 bytes of download for every 64k sent.)

Then, the person just starts sending and people start accruing costs.

I'm not advocating that someone should do this. I'm just worried that they might choose to.

This just strikes me as so very open to malicious attack. That I can scan networks to find smart phones on Virgin (or other networks), and do no more than a ping flood those IPs to incur thousands of dollars in excess charges to a unwitting person.

It takes the term Denial Of Service attack to an entirely new level of bad.

if that happened they probably have to fix the problem ;-)

The price and quality of communications in Australia is absolutely ridiculous. I mostly blame the monopoly/biopoly (Telstra and somewhat Optus) but the competitors aren't much better either.

It's also just going to get worse with the new "cleanfeed".

It certainly is. When we moved from Aus to Europe, we shopped around for broadband plans and I kept asking what the download limit was. Lots of blank looks. I used to have a 30GB/month plan in Aus. They don't have limits here.

In fairness, Europe and US have large populations accessing data over many links, so the cost is spread wide. Australia accesses much US data over few links and must bear the cost of that. Data is simply more expensive in Australia.

The telco's have probably had discussions on how to make local data not part of a cap, but it would be too hard to explain to normal people how to ensure that the data is locally hosted.

I've had the same experience with broadband in the UK - unlimited is the norm. The international link costs probably do have an effect with this, but I don't think it is for mobile data. If international links were the limiting factor we'd see ADSL suppliers selling usage at similar rates, but $15 for a GB seems much higher.

I think it's actually the capacity of the mobile network. To support more throughput they'll need to install more cell towers, which is a capital expense. The telcos probably find it more profitable to restrict usage and just charge the higher users as much as possible for as long as the network will sustain it.

I just buy prepaid Internet. If I use too much data, all they know is that some guy with cash used up his quota.

(I would like to do this in the US, but nobody will sell me prepaid 3G or WiMax.)

Why don't they just make their data plan overage the same rate as the the plan itself ($30/1GB = .03/MB overage fees). Hell it even happens in canada.

The stated reason? Because they can do it more cheaply if they know how much capacity they budget for up-front. It's the same reason plan minutes are so much cheaper than overage minutes.

Of course, I can't even imagine how that would account for a factor of ten (the lowest on the list), much less 140.

I just monitor my internet. I wouldn't be opposed to a splash screen when you first sign in to tell you how much you use if they engage in this.

ya know, I'd love to read the article except the sites page contrast makes the site almost unreadable.

I really recommend you to get the Readability bookmarklet from Arc90: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

I don't use it that often, but when I do, it works great!

Plus: it is awesome when you want to print an article - and not all the ads & navig surrounding it !

Wow, that is usurious.

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