[LINK] Billing cellular sessions by the 1Mb unit.

[Stephen Loosley]

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