Hundreds of Verizon customers are battling data over-limit fees
syracuse.com
syracuse.com
Comcast has a mesh network in California I literally have free wifi (as a paying Comcast customer) anywhere I go. Definitely not a plug for Comcast as they are effectively broadcasting paying customers internet to freeloaders like myself. Morality of that is another debate though
You don't really pay for overages, you just buy blocks of 1GB of data ($10/GB), unused bits of that GB are prorated and roll into the next month, the phone coverage is a combination of T-Mobile, Sprint and I think U.S. Cellular and Wi-Fi. You can change your prepaid data allocation at any time, there's no contract. My base phone bill every month is $30 ($20 for service and $10 for 1GB of data) x 2 so $60/mo. If you choose to pay for your phone over 2 years it costs the same as buying the phone (they don't charge interest or anything else).
Voicemail uses google voices transcription tech, etc. We switched a while ago from Verizon, got a Nexus 6P (I think the Pixels are next in line), and the coverage has been about the same. Call quality is a smidge lower though. And oddly for Google, support has been very good, you talk to humans, they're friendly and answer quickly.
Management of the line is done through the user's google account and is very straightforward.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/22/8469571/google-fi-pricing-...
Our bill for 2 people went from 110$ per month with At&t to 28$ a month on USmobile.
Those anecdotes are pretty much worthless without that information.
I'm surprised the Verizon statement didn't mention to check that.
Which is idiotic, but still not as idiotic as iOS's lack of automatic data usage alerts.
But if I put on my tinfoil hat, how much crap has Verizon put on their phones? I'm not sure how likely, but it's not impossible to either have an app use up your data, or alter the data stats.
In any other case, I fully agree with you.
I suspect that any Androids approved by Google (which they need to be to have the play store preinstalled) aren't allowed to mess with the data collection, but the agreements aren't public so I don't know for sure.
(I think one was leaked in the Oracle lawsuit or something?)
Non-malevolant data providers are difficult to find.
The abysmally poor monitoring, control, and cost-management options offered subscribers all feed into this directly, and dovetail nicely with a previous conversation on the morality of technology. A technology which is financed by a major vendor, and is designed to maximise that vendor's profits (or worse: an entire opposed-to-the-subscriber economic sector) will be inherently biased against subscribers.
Highly obvious data usage tracking, stop-loss financial settings, a soft degredation, the ability to specify what specific traffic, types of traffic, and/or sites are available or supported, etc., would all help this out.
As an example on the last point: I've looked at 4GL WiFi hotspot devices. None of these that I've found supports configuring a firewall or blocklist on the device itself. For some strange reason, the telecoms and advertising-oriented providers of such devices don't find it in their interest to offer such capabilities.
I am increasingly utterly disgusted with the tech world. Some fun toys, yes. But so gratuitously user-hostile.
You'd think this was part of a Wells-Fargo sales enhancement strategy.
They're part of the CREDO family of philathropically-oriented businesses.
with regard to that, all the carriers have a benevolence wing (https://twitter.com/verizongiving for instance). So I guess cynically one can say this is just traditional capitalism with a different foot forward for a different demographic ... There's a very real ngo-industrial complex and they seem to highlight that that's where the money goes.
The SPLC for instance, has many members who make $100s of k a year in legal fees on behalf of the SPLC on top of their $300k salaries. They were also sitting on over $200 million of unused cash and made it an endowment that they invested in the market with ... these people involved in these charities have taken the donations of their members to propel themselves into the 1%. Splendid.
> "My son, like most young adults, is pretty phone savvy so I was sure he knew what to do."
That sort of statement is never a good sign.
> "Shinn insists her late husband's phone isn't used for anything other than looking at phone numbers of missed calls or dealing with incoming calls. How, she asks, is her late husband's phone using data?"
It's checking an email account or something?
> "When he reaches his data limit each month, he immediately shuts off his data. Yet every month for the last four months, his data exceeded his limit. The totals: 6.00900; GB 6.00200; GB 6.01100 GB; and 6.00400 GB."
The "you're over limit" is probably not sent at the exact femtosecond you go over it?
> "Verizon insists that many customers' problems hinge on the infamous "Wi-Fi Assist" button, Van Dinter said. With iPhones, this is automatically "on" under the iOS9 operating system, which was introduced a year ago."
Verizon's probably right. I saw my data usage go up dramatically with that.
> Why are people's phones using data in the middle of the night when the phones aren't being used and are turned off or are on do-not-disturb?
Because do-not-disturb prevents alerts, not usage, and phones check email etc. 24/7.
> If the times of the data pings aren't necessarily accurate and are really only within a six-hour window, how is it that the phone call time stamps on my bill are accurate to the minute? Verizon says data is tallied and reported in chunks.
Because phone calls aren't data usage.
What if the phone is shutting the data off automatically? Like the Data Usage settings on Android?
Thus far, three months in, I can say I'm not dissatisfied with the service. I'm not thrilled about the data rate, but the "competition" sells the same thing at about the same price.
But I've also never had issues with overages. I use maybe 2-3 GB/mo, on a cheap MVNO plan where I have 6 GB/mo with rollover. Since I never use up the 6 GB, I effectively have 12 GB/mo in case something goes crazy or I need to tether.
When I tether I get super-paranoid though, since macOS has no concept of "this is an expensive connection" so it will happily download gigabytes of Photoshop updates. Little Snitch is useful for these occasions - just whitelist the software you need & trust (email, messaging, browser)
What could go wrong?
I was paying more than that with a prepaid "plan" with less data, for example. The service is generally more expensive - I just happen to be a light user so it worked out for me. But if I call an 800 number or answer a phone call? I get charged. Plans subsidize the cost of the phone: Pre-paid does not, and the selection is generally full of refurbished phones and models 1-2 generations out of date. Most didn't have the option of the newest phone if you were on prepay. It used to be that some prepaid services wouldn't work on other networks or would charge so much it wasn't feasible (verizon wouldn't work on at&t network).
Some companies simply don't offer international calling or texting on a prepaid plan: I had an issue where the company suddenly started charging extra for international texts because Norway suddenly wasn't on their list of included countries - and that was the entire reason I paid for that bulk texting.
I also found the customer service to be lacking. One company refused online customer service for prepaid customers: More than one had special, seemingly second class call centers for prepaid customers.
Simply put: I think the pay-as-you-go is probably a better setup there than in the states.
Our carriers are fighting the fact all that customers want from them is a "dumb pipe" to the Internet, and have structured services and handset purchases around funneling customers into long term contracts and complicated plans.
It's been getting better over the last few years, but "buy just a SIM and get a chunk of data for a reasonable price" plans still tend to have worse geographic coverage and lower throughput speeds.
Only real complaint is that I can't do something similar for data. I have yet to go over 5GB in a month since I use WiFi at home and at work which covers probably 90% of my data usage. Still, I'd like to be able to do something similar to buying more minutes where I authorize another $10 payment from my phone and add another block of 1GB.
I think that's the biggest issue I have with these overages people deal with. Whereas my plan just drops me down to some useless rate like 128k/sec if I go over, they get nailed with huge charges.
All these bigger carriers need to do is cut you off and offer you the option to refill. They could even charge a premium over what you normally pay for data because perhaps you really need to stay connected. But it's one thing to use up the 5GB you bought for $30 and then have to pay $10 for another 1GB when you run out on the 25th. It's another to just let you keep racking up charges that are both exorbitant and often unknown to the customer until their bill is $100+ more than usual.
Even using say just IG and scrolling a lot is gonna crew up data. Not as much as video, obviously, but if you're drifting from TW or FB to more IG then I could see more data being used.
As for usage while sleeping, usage while off, etc. Well, obviously that's a BIG problem. I'm not making excuses but probably no surprise. Computers aren't perfect, are they?
This is especially annoying when the first thing it shows is an unskippable 30 second ad with no option to adjust the quality because it's an ad.
The difference between those two numbers is 0.09 GB. 0.09 is 3.8% of 2.35, or 4.0% of 2.26, so whichever way you look at it, it would be correct to say the difference is "within 5%".
Used Android usage features and, sure enough, it shows roughly the same as Verizon. And most is Web data.
Still, something seems awfully fishy. I wonder if Verizon's Web gateway or similar could be the problem? I need to do some comparisons with Wi-Fi to check whether page sizes, etc are the same.
Otherwise, maybe a Chrome or other update?
Anyway,something has absolutely changed--literally from one month to the next--starting a few months back.
However, it turned out not to be the case. http://www.techinsider.io/how-much-data-is-pokmon-go-using-2...
about 3mb/hr, light relative to most photo/video heavy social apps.
You can't really make these claims without actually comparing what apps used how much data on your phone
Also if one installs the Verizon iPhone app you can use a widget so I see my usage daily when checking the weather and schedule and so on.
I also recommend buying the omnistat app that shows you data consumed real time.
The switch back to VZ from AT&T (after just 3 months) cost me hundreds of dollars, and was still worth it. (Thankfully T-Mobile had a weeklong trial program that saved me from going through with that switch)
VZ gets away with higher pricing and abusive customer support because their network is unmatched in my opinion. My experience is obviously anecdata, and I don't live in a densely populated city, so that may be worth noting.
Where I live TMO data speeds are much faster than both ATT and Verizon (we have tested in the office with people on different carriers). TMO service is also better than Verizon where I live, and if you travel overseas at all nothing beats TMO.
The best part of this is that all of the big carriers are improving their networks like never before. Hopefully sooner rather than later, network coverage will not be a competing point.
Data usage has grown dramatically and the spectrum availability in your market can make a difference. VZ, AT&T, and others have purchased AWS-3 Band 66 spectrum which they are brining on-line but the iPhone 7 and Galaxy 7 chips don't support it.
It is 10 AM ET and I just ran a Speedtest in Upper West Side Manhattan and have 41 Mbits/sec down and 6.5 up on iPhone 7+.
On iPhones, install the VZ App, install the widget, get the Omnistat app and that should help with knowing your data usage.
Also, it's very easy to see which apps are using the most data. Just keep an eye on them, where it shows the highest data usage. Delete all apps that use more than X amount of data and switch to a competing app.
As long as we have choices, businesses and apps must bend to our will. How long do you think Pokemon Go would last if everyone stopped using it because it used too much data? We are consumers, and as long as there is competition, we are All powerful.
I received a 75% warning on a Friday night from them, continued to use data (some streaming), and never got the 90% warning, until Monday morning when I received about 20 text messages saying I had used 90%, then 100%, resulting in the automatic purchase of 1 GB more, then 75%, 90%, etc. Even with their credit for the misunderstanding it still cost me > $150 for that lesson.
Not sure how people didn't notice...
The usage Verizon logs is just an estimate for that moment in time. So if you're notified that you're over this evening, you may have actually gone over yesterday.
But that doesn't change the fact that data caps are arbitrarily set cash-grabs and should be either abolished entirely on both home and mobile plans, or should be regulated to have consistent costs that are tiered sanely, rather than the current "friendly allotment, arm-and-leg overage" model.
I won't suggest the article's complaints are baseless, however, even if the article itself reflects the poor community journalism I remember expecting from the Post-Standard. Because even if Verizon isn't falsifying usage data for users, the whole game is partly rigged! A typical user has no idea what their actual usage is, or what their devices do automagically in their absence. I've seen 10 GB prepaid cell data allowances get liquidated the very evening of the day they were topped off by project volunteers using laptops. In one case, a user checking and writing email forgot to disable Windows Updates. In another instance, the user had no concept of how large the neat videos he uploaded to the project's FB page actually were. Without a real concept of how much data they actually use, most users will end up finding a data plan mostly by trial & error--they will go as cheap as they can, and incrementally adjust to a larger plan when they "go over" (rinse & repeat). I think of the numerous uncomfortable talks and arguments in households everywhere based on stupid ideas of what constitutes data use, and parents who are no better informed than their children about what they can do to actually reduce household data usage.
And yes, turning off automatic updates, "wifi assist", and other settings is good advice. Except that many of these settings have a mysterious way of getting re-enabled in commercial OSes. Why is it necessary for users to constantly police their own device settings because the Apples, Microsofts, and Googles of the world have other ideas? If you're running a non-libre OS (which is unavoidable on smart phones, presently), you might as well expect some hardship here. Your device does what it wants, because its makers don't think it actually belongs to you.
I suspect that the main reason my experience with Verizon Wireless has been nearly painless (if not inexpensive) is because I keep only a dumb phone and several machines installed with Slackware. My data usage may be larger some months, but I always know why! It's never a surprise.
This would explain why the user behaviour doesn't have to change but the data usage does.