Permit me to rant for just a moment, if you will.
Got the girls’ cell phone bill last week, opened it and was unpleasantly surprised to see it was about double what it normally is. Further analysis revealed that the extra charges were from mobile browsing, almost $50 for each phone. Wow, that’s a lot of mobile browsing, you might say. You would be wrong. The amount of data for each phone was less than a megabyte, in fact. Let’s put that into perspective here: that much data would fit onto a floppy disk, if you remember what those are.  The rate for this charge was there in black and white: $51.20/MB
I can’t be the only one thinking that’s a little excessive, when (as I found out) you can get an all-you-can browse plan for $3/month? Even at 3G speeds (and these phones aren’t 3G), my iPhone plan with Rogers is $30 for 6GB/month. That’s a half a cent/MB folks, or approximately 5000 times cheaper. I understand they want to drive people to use their data plans, and pay for capacity they aren’t using, but this smacks of robbery to me.
Needless to say I called to complain about the charges and to Bell’s credit they reversed the charges for me, but only because I don’t complain often.
What gives?
Hi Court,
I’ve seen so many scary bills over the past few years i can’t believe it – Rogers, Bell, Primus, Telus – you name it .
and what’s also horrible about getting on the phone with these dudes is that none of the plans are in writing – only half the time will they give you a confirmation number and then, in two months when the savings aren’t reflected on your bill anywhere, you find out the reference number you gave them ‘pulls up NOTHING’ for the next agent – brutal.
I’m in the midst of cancelling a useless longdistance plan called VNET for a client – it’s some kind of a legacy gouger-plan where you only save money if you make 58,000 ld minutes a month – until oyou hit that 58,000LD a month threshhold you pay approx 30cents a minute within canada and more to the states. holy. I hammered it down to 4cents a minute across canada … but… after 2 months – Bell hadn’t removed the VNET – – – oh, they had applied the 4 cents a minute . but it was overrulled by the preexisting plan that buddy never cancelled – and never trickled onto the bill..
all my contact names and notes and call dates and teims and employee numbers and case numbers added up to ‘Jack S***’ and nobody was authorized to give me a retroactive credit nor could they explain WHO had activated the unapplied 4 cents a minute plan to the account – – and if you want some real fun – try to get out of the yellow pages… Theres’ only ONE GUY handling all the businesses in ottawa – and you can never get him and then … oops … it’s to late to get out for next year and….