$17 Thousand for a Few Online Hours on iPhone in Roaming

Last week the blogosphere in Russia discussed yet another interesting topic regarding the famous Apple’s device and a huge bill sent to one of subscribers of a local mobile carrier for some international exuberance. And since the summer full of vacations abroad is in full play, the story quickly got to be a very hot one though there’s nothing particularly special about it – nothing but the amount of the bill involved: $17 thousand from a cell phone carrier after a vacation abroad.

The story involves a woman who had a corporate iPhone paid for by her employer which she used as her only phone and did not think twice about using when she headed to Egypt for a vacation with her son. Over there her son spent about 4 hours playing mobile games on the device (really, kids love them, everyone knows) which resulted in an enormous bill for GPRS received upon arrival.

But since the phone was corporate and the woman happened to work for a well-known (and quite wealthy) company, the management has attempted to initiate a discussion with the carrier trying to prove that the carrier has enabled a service of mobile roaming without subscriber’s knowledge. At that it is a well-known fact that in Russia mobile carriers are frequently abusing their rates and roaming is one example of what you should really not even consider when abroad – and buy a local SIM card everywhere you possibly can.

Hence the enormous amount was not really totally surprising for many users who frequently arrive home with as much as minus $300 on their accounts after using some mobile internet abroad. But in this case the subscriber really has little chances to win anything at all given that the carrier has reminded everyone that on iPhone one needs to explicitly turn data in roaming on (the feature is disabled by default) so this could not be an unintentional use of an unwanted feature – child playing games or whatever it may be.

So now the carrier claims that the subscriber could probably fail to read the manuals for her iPhone and could simply not know that some applications on her iPhone could connect to the internet and exchange data in background mode – without any consideration for how expensive mobile traffic can be abroad. And we are all reminded once again that reading manuals and checking settings should really become a habit – especially if one uses a complex device like an iPhone, Blackberry or Android.

So while my first reaction was to support the poor subscriber who has unintentionally managed to lose $17k by doing something I myself can easily do abroad without even realizing it could be expensive, now it is quite obvious again that any gadget is nothing but a tool and the user is the only one responsible for how the gadget is used. And at least this ridiculous story taught us all in Russia one thing: iOS actually has a setting to disable data exchange in general and when in roaming. Besides, now our mobile carriers actually describe to users exactly how they should set their smart phones up to avoid extra charges in roaming – and this is definitely an improvement given the overall draconian prices.

Via (in Russian)