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How 10 Minutes of Cell Phone Use Can Cost $187

Liz MetcalfeLiz Metcalfe RSS Feed
Mar 19th 2010 at 4:29PM
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Filed under: Buyer Beware, Technology

When Mitchell Brown's cell phone bill arrived this month, the total was so high he did a double-take aPalm Pre - Smart Phonend immediately started a line-by-line examination of the charges.

"There was nothing weird with the land line or Internet usage, but then I got to the wireless page and there was a charge of $187 for a roaming access charge," the Toronto journalist told WalletPop. "That's all it said: no explanation, no dates, nada."

A call to Bell got him transferred to Bell Mobility, where a representative told Brown that someone had used a smart phone on three separate occasions on Jan. 30 while travelling in the U.S.

Turns out that Brown's wife Michelle Scrimgeour-Brown had gotten lost while on a shopping trip in Buffalo with some friends. Just as she would have done in Toronto, Scrimgeour-Brown had tried to use her phone to access Google Maps. The session timed out three times. The three Internet sessions referenced by Bell were actually three unsuccessful attempts to access a map.

"We're basically talking about 10 minutes of access costing us $187," said Brown.

"How could a few minutes of phone surfing possibly cost almost $200?" Brown had asked the Bell Mobility representative.

The rep was sympathetic, Brown recalled, but couldn't do anything about the charge. Bell doesn't own the infrastructure south of the border, so when a Bell subscriber uses the Web on a smart phone outside Bell's territory, it has to charge a fee to cover the cost of users accessing the Internet in the U.S.

It was an expensive way for the Toronto-based family to learn to turn off roaming when outside their cellular carrier's territory. "Michelle was mortified," said Brown. "She didn't know."

"Funny how Bell doesn't put THAT in their ads," said Brown. "Don't you think it would be nice of them to let you know how much it costs before it's on your bill?"

Complaints about cell phone companies topped the list of complaints made to the Better Business Bureau last year, and billing was so confusing that in the U.S. the Federal Communications Commission is asking for help in advising cellular companies on how to simplify their bills.

The lesson? "Paper rules," said Brown. Paper maps, that is.

But turning off roaming when you enter the U.S. may not be enough to avoid such errant charges. When travelling near the Canada-U.S. border, your phone may temporarily switch to a U.S. carrier's network without you knowing it, said WalletPop's tax and technology blogger Terry Fong.

"I was once charged $25 for a 20-minute call that should have cost $4 because I made the call while on a train from Montreal to Toronto," he said. "I was off the Rogers network when I made the call."

Data costs can be even more expensive, Fong noted, especially if the network is not your carrier's U.S. partner.

Read what Fong says you need to do to prevent something like this from happening to you.

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