Filed under: iPhone
Dear Auntie TUAW: Did I overstep my data limits?
Cara Tia TUAW,
I need your help please. I am in Mexico and have an iPhone with a 150 MB data plan and 300 minutes. My carrier says that I have passed my data limit and owe them around $150 usd. According to the Cellular Network Data on my iPhone, I have used 35MB and 83 minutes (Settings > General > Usage). My question is, is this information technically good enough to fight back these charges? I think it must be, but I have to be sure. Can you help me, please?
Love, Joe P
p.s. Why I don't have an unlimited data plan? because it costs around $110 usd a month, that's why. My current data plan costs about $55 a month. Thank you!
Dear Joe P,
Auntie wishes she had better news for you, but the usage meter on the phone is notoriously unreliable. If you've restored or updated your iPhone in the last month (2.0.1 anyone?), you may have accidentally reset those values. Personally, we at TUAW can sneeze through 150 MB just by loading our own home page (or maybe it just seems that way).
Of course, feel free to contact customer service -- but relying on the onboard usage stats isn't going to take you very far.
Sorry for the bad news, caro.
Love,
Auntie TUAW
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Balls said 5:23PM on 8-14-2008
Now that $110 unlimited plan doesn't seem so bad, does it.
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Buckingham said 5:35PM on 8-14-2008
I also don't have an unlimited plan (Fido/Canada), and Fido does not even provide data transfer stats. Is it fair to say that they should provide these stats? How do you actually dispute issues when it comes to data overcharges assuming there is no determinate method to get the exact transfer figures?
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kdfwagen said 8:44PM on 8-14-2008
iirc, i think fido/rogers will send you a text message when you are close to reaching your data limit. alternatively, you could always phone fido (*611) for free and find out.
Ben said 12:45AM on 8-15-2008
If you have the $30 6GB plan thats essentially unlimited. Most of At&T's unlimited plans are soft capped at 5gb. The iPhone one may be an exception but I'd challenge you to go through 6gb of data usage in a month on an iPhone. I've tried to use as much as possible and I'm nowhere near.
Sammy said 5:44PM on 8-14-2008
I also live in mexico and have the same problem. I will be spending my saturday morning complaining. Funny thing is this: if you believe the phone company (telcel) is mistaken you HAVE to buy a detailed call report, and if they are indeed mistaken then they DONT return the cost of this call report. An unethical company owned by an unethical beast, can't even call it a man; Carlos Slim.
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Alyssey said 5:51PM on 8-14-2008
And this is the reason I will never EVER use an iPhone while on the Telcel network... they are totally trying to rip us Mexicans off.
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christiam said 6:07PM on 8-14-2008
its easier to use another phone, the iphone is good but the morons who bought it here in mexico must be really rich...
i mean if you know a little of math then you know that with a 3G phone you can suck 150 MB in just minutes.
plus every KB is worth .004 dollars so 1MB is billed at 4 dollars... a song downloaded via an iphone here in mexico cost 25 dollars... plus .99 dollars for the actual price of the song
so talk about stupid iphone buyers here in mexico thats a good story...
sorry nokia is best for all of our pockets at least here in mexico
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smokeonit said 6:09PM on 8-14-2008
and don't forget that the up and download is counted!!!
so 35MB down and let;s say 15MB upload makes 50MB in total...
150MB is easy to reach by surfing each day for 5-10min and dl all email attachments your receive during the day....
i have 250MB/month and i normally use 150-200MB, but i rarely use the EDGE/3G, mostly i have good wifi coverage where i move around....
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Bruce Hoult said 7:33PM on 8-14-2008
Actually, i find the iPhone's data meter to tally precisely with Vodafone NZ's deducting money from my prepay balance. (I have a 1st gen iPhone, with a pwned 2.0 OS and prepay SIM).
A few days ago I did one of my regular balance enquiries and noticed that 1c had disappeared. I was puzzled as I didn't think I'd made any calls or used any data. But a check on the iPhone showed 1 KB up, and 1 KB down since the last reset. Which tallies precisely, as the charges for data without a plan are 0.5c per KB. (until you hit 200 KB in a day, after which the charge stays at $1.00 until you hit 10 MB).
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LuminousNerd said 7:22PM on 8-14-2008
If the meter on the iPhone is unreliable, then how the hell are you supposed to keep tabs on your data if you have limited data?
They can't require you to stay within limits if you have no way of knowing where those limits are or how close you are to them!!
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Big John said 7:36PM on 8-14-2008
Yeah they can!
kirk said 8:02PM on 8-14-2008
I made the mistake of roaming while in Mexico with my iPhone last spring to the tune of $600. What was bad was Telcel billed ATT (and ATT bill me) over the course of two months -- but for the same time periods same part of the day!
I also learned that at least with roaming they round up to the nearest K, so if you used only a few bytes to check for mail, you get billed for using a whole kilobyte. This is probably why there's a huge discrepancy between what the phone says and what the phone company charges.
I was able to convince ATT to knock about half of my charges off my bill which was probably easy for them to absorb since there's no way in the world they pay Telcel the obscene rates (ATT roaming is about double what T-mobile charged me per kilobit, both times roaming on Telcel).
What pisses me off was I actually tried to use the Prodigy Movil hotspot in the Mexico City airport but it was broken (and I didn't think I would actually use $10 worth of bandwidth while waiting for the plane).
Since that trip I've gone back to Mexico a few times but leave the data off. I'll use wifi hotspots and even pay Sr. Slim for Prodigy Movil before turning on data roaming again.
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nbidgood said 8:13PM on 8-14-2008
you can just click the "Reset Statistics" button to set the data usage counters (and call timer) to zero.
So, even if the iPhone's data meter were reliable, it's not going to prove anything about your data usage, since you could have reset the meter at any time. Sorry
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macgirl said 11:14PM on 8-14-2008
Yes you can reset the Statistics, but the phone says when you did it.
I have no problems so far.
And yes Telcel is awful but the other options are worst.
sonicwind said 8:56PM on 8-14-2008
I don't know how things work in Mexico, but if I had that problem in the US, I would call up customer service and say "hey, this phone has a feature on it that shows usage which I was going by. Since you sold me this phone with this feature, this is your responsibility" In my experience this will always work but you will have to be persistent, the first reaction to this will be for them to deny responsibility. Even if you upgraded the firmware, did they notify you that the information reported on the phone would be reset?
I had $500 taken off a bill by Cingular a few years ago under even worse circumstances I ended up having to go up 3 manager levels (partly because each level only has authority to credit so much.)
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Felipe said 9:47PM on 8-14-2008
Not surprising, it's Telcel.
Only of Apple came up with an iDEN iPhone to get it working with Nextel. That's what a bunch of Crackberry addicts do.
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JKT said 10:47PM on 8-14-2008
Trust no one. When I went to France last week, I removed the SIM card from my iPhone. I'd heard the horror stories about $600+ roaming bills and refused to even take the chance--turning off data roaming on the iPhone was not safe enough for me. With the SIM removed, as far as anyone was concerned, that phone was still in the U.S. Sticking to WiFi only (which, by the way, was sparse) enabled me to actually put the iPhone away and enjoy my vacation instead of being tethered to a communications device 24/7. :-)
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BTB said 8:37AM on 8-15-2008
Erica wrote:
"Personally, we at TUAW can sneeze through 150 MB just by loading our own home page (or maybe it just seems that way)."
Not only is TUAW one of the slowest pages to load on my iPhone, scrolling through the TUAW page is the most reliable way to crash Mobile Safari. Having seen similar complaints in other comment threads, I would think you guys would try to do something about this.
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Sam said 2:44AM on 8-15-2008
Is there an iPhone optimized website for TUAW?
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Maverick said 12:59PM on 8-15-2008
The best option here in Mexico is to buy a first generation iPhone, unlock it and use it with prepayed cards!
www.neltelcel.com
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