

The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet" - angusgr
http://projectgus.com/2010/01/in-australia-a-3g-mobile-data-plan-can-cost-you-thousands/

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mortenjorck
This whole model of "go over and we'll make you sorry, sunshine" is terrible
for innovation. It encourages tentative, cautious use of services that could
be more valuable if they were used without fear of financial punishment.

If you must ration throughput, a much better model is one that drops its
bandwidth after hitting a cap. Though nothing compares to actually upgrading
your network so you don't have to grudgingly provision resources like some
kind of Dickens villain.

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robryan
I had the Telstra 60GB plan up until they upgraded them about a month ago,
because of the excess usage charge you would have to try and stop a safe
distance from your cap, never getting the full 60GB, it would also lag behind
on updating, although not as much, up to about 12 hours I think.

They also have a tendency to list some of your usage on the next day when it
was used before midnight. Really annoying when your using your plan up on the
last day, then some of that gets transferred to the next month.

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tdm911
This reminds of me how Three Mobile in Australia drops back to Telstra when
roaming. This is by default and the user is none the wiser (unless they had
the knowledge to turn off roaming).

I think every person I know who has a Three phone used an amount of data in
their first month whilst roaming and had a $100+ excess usage charge (often
much higher).

I'm sure it's all spelled out to them upon purchasing, but it's not clear and
your average user has no idea what roaming is.

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astrec
My old 3 phone used to constantly roam in 3's own broadband area. Ka-ching! Of
the VHA brands Vodafone is the better of the two.

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michaelneale
I registered a complaint with the ACCC with this a few years ago - they kept
it on file, but couldn't really do much until there was a flood over epic
bills (and they admitted it was hard for them to understand what the
likelihood of this sort of thing happening, but they did appreciate it was
unsavoury).

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thedevelopment
Imagine if this was combined with the iPhone worm from a few months back. It'd
essenially pingflood all phones exposed on the telco networks and screw
thousands of people in excess changes without them even knowing something was
going on.

This worries me greatly. (puts iPhone on WiFi mode)

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angusgr
I didn't put this in the blog post, but hypothetically speaking you would not
even need a worm.

A person would need an ISP account where you don't get limited on uploads
(like Internode, or most non-Australian ISPs, for instance.)

A person would need to spoof the ping return address, so the ping never comes
back to them. Or spoof a UDP stream where the ICMP port unreachable never
comes back (or don't spoof it, and put up with 32 bytes of download for every
64k sent.)

Then, the person just starts sending and people start accruing costs.

I'm not advocating that someone should do this. I'm just worried that they
might choose to.

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thedevelopment
This just strikes me as so very open to malicious attack. That I can scan
networks to find smart phones on Virgin (or other networks), and do no more
than a ping flood those IPs to incur thousands of dollars in excess charges to
a unwitting person.

It takes the term Denial Of Service attack to an entirely new level of bad.

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pufuwozu
The price and quality of communications in Australia is absolutely ridiculous.
I mostly blame the monopoly/biopoly (Telstra and somewhat Optus) but the
competitors aren't much better either.

It's also just going to get worse with the new "cleanfeed".

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cromulent
It certainly is. When we moved from Aus to Europe, we shopped around for
broadband plans and I kept asking what the download limit was. Lots of blank
looks. I used to have a 30GB/month plan in Aus. They don't have limits here.

In fairness, Europe and US have large populations accessing data over many
links, so the cost is spread wide. Australia accesses much US data over few
links and must bear the cost of that. Data is simply more expensive in
Australia.

The telco's have probably had discussions on how to make local data not part
of a cap, but it would be too hard to explain to normal people how to ensure
that the data is locally hosted.

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msmithstubbs
I've had the same experience with broadband in the UK - unlimited is the norm.
The international link costs probably do have an effect with this, but I don't
think it is for mobile data. If international links were the limiting factor
we'd see ADSL suppliers selling usage at similar rates, but $15 for a GB seems
much higher.

I think it's actually the capacity of the mobile network. To support more
throughput they'll need to install more cell towers, which is a capital
expense. The telcos probably find it more profitable to restrict usage and
just charge the higher users as much as possible for as long as the network
will sustain it.

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jrockway
I just buy prepaid Internet. If I use too much data, all they know is that
some guy with cash used up his quota.

(I would like to do this in the US, but nobody will sell me prepaid 3G or
WiMax.)

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elai
Why don't they just make their data plan overage the same rate as the the plan
itself ($30/1GB = .03/MB overage fees). Hell it even happens in canada.

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amalcon
The stated reason? Because they can do it more cheaply if they know how much
capacity they budget for up-front. It's the same reason plan minutes are so
much cheaper than overage minutes.

Of course, I can't even imagine how that would account for a factor of ten
(the lowest on the list), much less 140.

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zitterbewegung
I just monitor my internet. I wouldn't be opposed to a splash screen when you
first sign in to tell you how much you use if they engage in this.

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butterfi
ya know, I'd love to read the article except the sites page contrast makes the
site almost unreadable.

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Timothee
I really recommend you to get the Readability bookmarklet from Arc90:
<http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

I don't use it that often, but when I do, it works great!

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CalmQuiet
Plus: it is awesome when you want to _print_ an article - and not all the ads
& navig surrounding it !

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aaronblohowiak
Wow, that is usurious.

