Karl and Noel write, >> I note that more and more mobile providers are now charging for data >> sessions by rounding each session up to the next megabyte. >> >> This is something which strikes me as unfair - any person who uses >> their smartphone in an area with less than perfect coverage can have >> their allowance eaten up or overages skyrocket due to data sessions >> automatically > > yeah, try going .. a 22 min drive, if you leave data on, you eat about > 10 MB in charges, without using any data... and that's "each way" not > total trip :) > >> .. reconnecting and registering as a full megabyte of usage, when only >> a few kilobytes has traversed the network. > > try a few bytes. >
Yes, agreed completely. Was only thinking this exact same thing yesterday. We're with AldiMobile (Telstra 3G) and, here's a part of a recent invoice. They advertise that they charge 5 cents / megabyte / session for net data. For this particular Android tablet, I've never used a tenth of a megabyte per THEIR session which appears to be one hour. That's their session, not our actual session. Therefore they're charging 5 cents/hour NOT /megabyte. We power-off this tablet, for long periods of time, when it's not in use. But in future with always-on smartphones that continually update, it will soon get ridiculous. Surely the ACCC should have a word or ten about this? Data 15.58KB $0.05 2013-11-04 03:03:44 Data 33.65KB $0.05 2013-11-04 04:03:26 Data 7.55KB $0.05 2013-11-04 05:33:22 Data 38.41KB $0.05 2013-11-04 06:02:49 Data 26.37KB $0.05 2013-11-04 08:03:16 Data 7.39KB $0.05 2013-11-04 09:32:00 Data 17.99KB $0.05 2013-11-04 10:02:16 Data 7.45KB $0.05 2013-11-04 11:02:59 Data 8.1KB $0.05 2013-11-04 13:32:48 Data 28.58KB $0.05 2013-11-04 14:02:13 Data 8.18KB $0.05 2013-11-04 15:31:11 Data 18.5KB $0.05 2013-11-04 16:00:28 Data 21.86KB $0.05 2013-11-04 16:31:28 Data 7.5KB $0.05 2013-11-04 17:29:42 Cheers, Stephen _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
