Originally Posted by
biffbo
Not sure where else to post this for now....
I recently purchased a My Touch phone 1 day prior to leaving for China for 2 weeks. I did this AFTER consulting with a T-Mobile rep telling him where I was going and that I wanted to make sure the phone work there via another sim card or whatever.
I turned on the phone in China and to my surprise, it rang and I got a call from the US....it was already working. I thought..."OK, no need for the sim card etc." ..Seeing as I was not planning to use the phone much, I figured that any roaming charges would also be reasonably low.
What I did not bargain for was that simply by having my phone turned on, it was all by itself, adding up it's own data roaming charges...to the tune of OVER $3000 in the two weeks!!!!!! The default settings were set up to automatically run up my bill. Almost as if T-Mobile had boobytrapped my phone or sabotaged it to make them money.
I may have sent all of 20 emails from the phone while in China and made around 30 calls and received about 20 calls....very light use.
I have talked to several T-Mobile reps about this and they are all unsympathetic about this. I do not think that these charges are reasonable. I do not hesitate to pay for charges if they are MY charges, but these are the phones OWN charges in my opinion. At least 90% of these data roaming charges are erroneous and not because of any of MY usage. The "android" (An android is a robot[1] or synthetic organism[2] designed to look and act like a human.) seems to have a mind of it's own and now had a bill of it's own too.....
If GM sold me a car that was setup to automatically start up at 3am and run for 4 hours without me knowing it.....I bet that Judge Wopner would agree that GM would owe me for the spent gas. The DEFAULT settings for these type phones should always be set to a non-chargeable setting and ONLY ship with settings that will not alter or add too your bill....my opinion.
I now know how to manually shut off these services to avoid these bills in the future, but I was not made aware of this potential nightmare (which T-Mobile has known about since the G1 ...as I find out by internet searches about this problem) when talking to the TM rep prior to my trip to China. Knowing about this problem and not fixing it is either BAD management or a malicious billing scheme.
UGH!!!
HELP!
Though I can't help with the specific problem of T-Mo's new data roaming fees (as opposed to International EMail - which ScottC pointed out as a difference in one of the earliest replies to this thread). Here's what I would advise:
1) Admitted this is too late but, mainly because of this thread (and others related to AT&T's international data roaming charges for iPhone users), I have become very very very vigilant about drilling way way way down to the exact answer I need on these issues including asking what, if anything, I need to do to ensure the phone does not do something automatically that can run up my bill. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you here (indeed, you spoke to the TMo rep and were under immense time pressure before the trip), but my advice to future reviewers of this thread is to get very detailed with the rep, get a name, ask specific tech questions about how to ensure this doesn't happen to you, and be prepared for a battle upon your return (when it inevitably does happen).
2) I've always found T-Mo to be very reasonable about these types of screw ups and I would continue to elevate the issue through their billing people and, if necessary, with corporate (sorry, no juice in the case of the latter as it never went that far for me).
Here's my example, I was a fairly earlier adopter of the TMo Hotspot at home service. Unbeknownst to me (mostly because of me - see now I've leave my lesson), international calls were billed at full-boat TMo international call rates - didn't matter if you were using their cell network or via your Hotspot service. I blithely chatted away to folks all around the world for the entire billing cycle (who needs Skype!) and got a whopper of a bill. I called T-Mo immediately and basically said, why would I go from $0 worth of international calls for years with T-Mo to $1000+ for a month (to wit the first month of HotSpot at Home Service), they listened and blam, rolled back all the charges.
You might try the same thing with them in your case. Listen, you spoke to the rep and started up with a new phone with all these new wackadoodle features and had zero idea that the phone would automatically start ringing up charges. Through your email is sparse on the subject, it sounds like you went from something less sophisticated phone (perhaps one without data, certainly one without Android) to the myTouch. Such a ramp up, a la my experience with HotSpot, to a totally new setup should not be an "instant" knowledge of all the costly pitfalls associated with the new device. If you want to throw in some fake indignation, my bet is there was no significant manual with the device much less a "warning" - hold the legalistic flaming please - about international data charges. Use that against them.
Basically, what can they do except say no and hold you to the charges. Any reduction is a start.
FWIW - I've seen so many threads about this and similar blog posts elsewhere (see e.g. a comment to a Pogue post re: placement of the internet access key on Verizon phones which, if pressed by accident and immediately canceled still charges the user for data charges), I think this is another way mobile carriers are setting up the customer for all sorts of additional charges. As price competition seems to be all the rage these days, all the companies are looking to tack on "extras" (see, e.g., the airline industry) to extract extra cash from their customers. To the ramparts!