Using a data-enabled cellphone in a foreign land has become a little like falling asleep on a train in Naples if youre not careful, you could end up with empty pockets. You know the feeling.
Shock, fear, panic, said Mike Cottmeyer, a software consultant in Suwanee, Ga., referring to an $800 iPhone data bill hed been hit with after visiting Toronto for a few days last year. It kind of makes you sick to your stomach.
The roaming ripoff stems from a sad new kind of Catch-22: With all the contracts, agreements and stipulations weve signed on for, theres more fine print than ever and less time to read it. And like a high schoolers nightmare, if you fail to memorize everything, you could be in big trouble.
For an idea of how easy it is for travelers to rack up a nauseating data bill, consider that most phone companies charge roaming customers about two cents per kilobyte. How much is that? Well, your average e-mail message might be 10 kb. So thats around 20 cents per e-mail. Not instantly fatal.
Well, what if someone sends you a message with a snapshot in it that might run a megabyte or two (about 2,000 kb). So while the picture of your nephew in his first snowstorm might be priceless in one sense, in another it just cost you 40 bucks.
But even that is childs play. The real action comes when travelers use their phones to surf the Web or watch videos both of which can consume thousands of times more data than checking e-mail. The blogosphere is littered with ghastly tales of bill shock over such unanticipated fees, like the American who visited London for two weeks, bringing his Web-enabled iPhone, not a laptop, for all computing needs. The price tag on that bit of light traveling was just ...
...$3,000.
Then there was the Briton who, while vacationing in Portugal, decided to download an episode of Prison Break to his cellphone. The guy ended up owing close to $60,000.
Most of the really galactic fees like this one end up being partially refunded. When I complained, mine was too but it took me 20 minutes of arguing with the customer service rep, more than most people would likely bother with.
You get this false-positive feeling of comfort, said Gerry Purdy, an Atlanta-based mobile communications analyst for the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan. You get off the airplane and say, hey, the phone works? And my e-mails coming? Thats great.
But sometimes unwitting consumers and Web columnists dont realize theyve been silently shifted to a new set of much more expensive roaming rates that are, as Purdy put it, almost insane.
(AT&T says roaming users should receive a text message to beware of international rates, and that it's possible to disable the iPhone's roaming data feature. Not everyone I spoke to received such a warning.)
You might wonder if sending all this data around the world costs the telecoms that much money. But consider your home broadband connection, a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet that allows you to scarf down as many Web pages, photos, songs and movies as you can in one month. All for about $40 about the same as what they charged you for that pic of your nephew in the snow.
