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Due to the ease of unintentionally spending so much so fast, it seems like the US should have consumer protection laws in place that the mobile phone companies should at least be mandated to text or call you and let you know when you've gone $100 over your monthly bill.

from earlier today:

"The decision was the first step in a months-long process at the FCC that will ultimately result in another vote on whether carriers should be forced to alert consumers when they near their allotted limits for voice, text and data services. Carriers would be told through text and voice alerts before reaching their limits and they would be similarly warned when their carrier charges the user for international roaming fees."

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/10/fcc_votes_...

That's great and I fully support it, but in my case it wouldn't have done a damn thing to help. The MiFi has its own phone number which is separate from any other accounts you have with verizon. While it can accept text messages the only way to see them is to tether the MiFi to a computer and run the verizon connection manager which has a non-default tab where you can view and send texts. An email also wouldn't have helped because my wife was attending a wedding while her computer was downloading stuff back at the hotel, so by the time she saw the email it would have been too late.

My situation wasn't a gradual build-up of data charges over a month; the entire $900 worth of charges were incurred in just a few hours while the computer was unattended. The law should cause carriers to terminate service when the limit is reached, and only allow the limit to be exceeded if the customer explicitly requests it and authorizes the charges. This is especially true for a device like the MiFi, in our modern world of automatic updates, syncronization, and applications that phone home regularly for all sorts of reasons.

We were just in Canada in early September. As soon as we crossed the border, AT&T send me a warning-text saying, "you're roaming now, data is $15/mb, so heads up." (Obviously paraphrased, but the number is real.)

However, it was still hard to know when we were and weren't using data. There are options in the iPhone to turn cellular data on/off (which needs to be on to use GPS), and not to allow data roaming, but I still was unsure of when it was being used.

Our bill ended up being $217 for the month. It could have went much worse.

You can turn cellular data off on the iPhone and still use the GPS. Airplane mode, however, will shut off the GPS. What really kills you is that visual voicemail runs over the data network, and it's non-trivial to turn that off. I spent last month backpacking through Europe with my iPhone, using GPS every day, without unexpected charges by leaving data off. A friend of mine on the other hand turned data on for 5 minutes to check his email for a phone number. That triggered 10mb voicemail download and a nearly $200 bill for the month.

Yes - Every time I turn on Roaming Data with my iPhone in Vancouver, I do the mental calculation of "Is this thing that I'm about to do really worth $15/Megabyte". $900 would have been around 60 Megabytes of downloads.

Whenever I'm traveling in Canada for more than a couple days, I usually go pick up a local data plan and device.

Verizon is often acting like an evil megacorp, but in this case I'd say it's all your wife fault. The roaming rates are in the contract. Canadian telecoms may be charging Verizon a lot to use their networks.

When the said contract is over 25 pages long with legalese as the only language how can you expect anyone to know what they're saying? And cell companies know that if they make these terms unintelligible, they make more money.

How? With a little bit of effort. Spend 5 min. reading online reviews of the service before singing. Check the roaming rates before going to Canada, it takes 1 min. to find and read http://b2b.vzw.com/international/naroaming.htm

The EU has a 65$ cap past your standard bill. So you don't get bill shock over there. Instead, you get a message that states you are this close or exceeded the "loan".

Here phone companies literally give someone unlimited credit to hang themselves. Add that to 45 day period before you know about the bill. Yeah, its stacked against you.

The roaming rates were not in the contract or anything else she was shown or told at the verizon store when she bought the device. And, she bought it specifically for use in Canada when she's visiting her family, so she did ask if it would work there.

I eventually found the rates buried on the verizon website several clicks deep through greyed out deemphasized links in the mifi data plan options. They're not available anywhere in her account information. They're also displayed in a hard-to-read run-on sentence style that mixes all countries together, not an easy to understand table. Verizon is clearly trying to hide this information in order to trick users into huge charges.

So she was expecting Verizon to take care of her interests. She bought the device for use in Canada and didn't even ask for the price.

http://www.google.com/search?q=verizon+data+roaming+canada+r...

Usually if you call your carrier and whine for an extended period they will cancel your first "offense."

"Canada is such a technologically backward nation that it costs an order of magnitude more to send data over their maple-syrup-soaked drunken-beaver-operated telecommunications system than it does here in the US."

This is so true!!!