Please help me. I got 28K $ from at&t. I live in the US. I took two mobile connections under family plan. One is thru iPhone and other one is using other phone set. Last month, I exchanged the SIM cards in these phones. As I had unlimited data plan in one connection, I thought that there would not be any problem. Further, I didn't get any call or mail from AT&T at that time when I did the same. Recently, I got a call from AT&T mentioning that I am not supposed to exchange the SIM cards. Please suggest me what I should do now.

@chinadoll724:

I know how to read, the mistake was corrected because I sent an email.

There's actually a policy in place about this. I can't remember exactly what it said but if you have data charges above 10MB you can request a re-rate to an int'l data plan. Only if the cust calls in and asks for it. You would probably have to speak with a supervisor becuase most reps won't know about it.

@nickripley: except it will. much like the first generation ipod. do you know anyting about apple?

@Celested: A 1st gen iPhone won't be worth anything near it's full value in a few months! Do you know much about technology?

@IceEncasesFire:

Please learn to read. It says "and other parts of Europe" . . . It is right as is.

At least with unlocked phones, there's the option of buying local SIM cards, although that's getting a little harder with anti-terrorism laws popping up everywhere, and, more importantly, with GSM phones being locked to a carrier. Sure most phones (but not the iPhone) can be unlocked, but how many people know how to do that? The EU has placed some caps on roaming charges within Europe for customers of European phone companies. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more calls for regulation if the wireless carriers over here don't slash their international roaming rates, too.

"When Pierre visited Ibiza, Spain and Europe for two weeks, his iPhone went with him"

Ibiza is a Spanish island and Spain is part of Europe

It should read:
"When Pierre visited Europe for two weeks, his iPhone went with him"

And BTW, T-Mobile's unlimited international usage plane only applies to Blackberrys, not Pocket PCs, Treos or any other data devices.

to bad iphone users don't have the ability to do the following...

- install firefox
- install firefox add-on "No Script"
- install firefox add-on "AdBlock Plus"

this page, as of this comment, is 94kb with the above... of $.47 still rather expensive IMO for one page refresh.

doesn't this phone have wifi built in? can't you use it in a hotspot with no data transfer charges?

or am i dumb?

he is an absolute idiot............that is all.

common sense people, does anyone have it anymore?

Must be nice to have that much disposable income to throw $900 on a cellphone bill. He could've bought a 10mp digital SLR and taken VERY high quality pics for that much money.....

I travel to the UK a lot, but I buy unlocked phones and a pay-as-you-go SIM for Virgin Mobile. It costs me jack squat, even for incoming international calls. I am baffled that people still don't get it. No, yo won't be able to use your precious iPhone, but aren't you supposed to be on vacation anyway?

My phone bills: UK: $30.00, Croatia: $20.00, etc., etc. Easy, cheap local calls, cheap international SMS/Text messaging, manageable international calls, no surprises. Data transfer? No thanks - this is vacation!

Last time I was on vacation, I think I made about two phone calls, maybe three, and they were very short. I guess I just don't seek the sort of constant attention as this guy. If he could only get along awhile on his own a bit, he'd live a much cheaper life. Probably a better one, too.

There was the activation fee that they feel entitled to for making me wait five days, there were the eighty bucks I actually signed up for, there were mysterious charges with unintelligible acronyms, and then there was over $1300 for data consumption, charged by the kilobyte while I was in France for two weeks.

Before I left, I signed up for international service. I was given a choice: either I pay a buck and a half a minute for phone calls, or I pay five bucks a month to earn the right to pay only ninety-nine cents a minute. Outrageous, but I agreed to it. Since I go once a year to visit my stepmother, I chose the recurring plan. I budgeted for two, three hundred bucks of telephone service. I get a lot of calls because I'm a public defender. Nobody said a word about data. Nothing. And I never gave it any thought. I guess I assumed data would be unlimited like it is here.

OK, maybe that wasn't too bright for a lawyer, but how would I have imagined they'd charge by the kilobyte? It's like going out to a bar with your friends and being charged for beer by the spoonful.

When I got the bill, I was floored. I called to complain, and a sweet-sounding midwestern girl back-doored me into a different plan which lowered my bill to $611.00. An improvement, but still a rip-off.

This is beyond absurd, or silly, or bumbling, or overwhelmed. This is downright dishonest. This is larceny. This is like car salesmen in the seventies who asked whether you wanted tires with your new car. This should be a crime.

Whenever people ask to see my new toy, I show them all the cool features on my iPhone, but I tell them about the $1,700.00 bill, plus the dropped calls, plus the slow and intermittent EDGE network, and I tell them to wait until Apple's exclusive deal with AT&T is over and they go with other carriers. I can't wait to get back with T-Mobile, myself.

\/\/

Should there be an international option for the iPhone? Definitely. Wouldn't have done much for Captain Assumption here, though.

Even if the guy did know, did he have a choice? I mean, unlike most other phones, unlocking the iPhone to use a local SIM with better data rates isn't exactly for the faint of heart.

This guy is irresponsible, but AT&T isn't any better. They charged me $800 in long distance fees two months (consecutively) even after I called after the 1st month to correct the issue. Oh by the way I was only making calls from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and both areas were covered in my plan. Then, they politely shut off my cell phone services because I wouldn't pay the bill, and then they attempted to charge me a re-connect fee, and they wondered why I wanted to terminate my contract with them, hmmmm...
And yes, their customer service was quite remarkable, HA!

If someone had developed BitTorrent for iPhone, he might owe billions!

Here's a 39 eu phone via Orange, the company I use. That's the price to buy the phone without a subscrip. Great deal.

[www.orange.fr]

I bet this same person thinks that their US Constitutional rights & US laws apply to him in foreign countries as well.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the minutes used. There's only 10,000 minutes (168 hrs) in a week!

5 hours a day of voice for a whole month? Freaking insane. That's like 1/3 of your waking hours. And he was on VACATION for half of that month?

...and an additional $2.3 for the refresh when I submitted the comment (an additional 460 kB for a total of aprox 1.6 megs): now it's $8.13

People are acting 205 megs is a huge number. It isn't. Just visiting the Consumerist home page and clicking over to this page is about 1.2 megs, or $5.83 at the $.005 per kB rate mentioned in a previous post on this subject.

$5.83 to view two rather ordinary web-pages is ridiculous. The fact that the iPhone views "the real internet" rather than a down-rezzed proxy is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to your overseas use of the phone.

On The Street (Wall Street), there were estimates that the overall expenditure for a customer that has a 2 year contract would be about $3K to 6K American.

I'm disappointed in how at&t has set this massive honey trap up for us. And how many have gotten sucked into it.

Let us prey upon the iPhone's weaknesses my friends, unlock it's hidden potential and unleash all of its service options. Give the appliance true life that it truly deserves!

Allow at&t to wallow in the spoils of their marketing victory. But they will burn from the many wounds of the aftermath.

@Pope John Peeps II: Attacking a consumer for well... being a consumer is rather juvenille don't you thing? Some people choose to spend $500 on a pda that's buy one get one free in a matter of months while others (such as Pierre) prefer to invest that money on a piece of technology that will hold it's value for it's entire existance. A post such as yours that has little to nothing to do with the subject at hand and is little more than a poorly masked iPhone jab doesn't shine badly on the phone or its users, but instead reveals you as a petty, spiteful person and negates whatever substance that possibly could've been pulled from your comment.

With that being said I really don't have too much sympathy for this guy. I'd understand if it was a one time thing where he was in a bind and needed to use the internet for some sort of emergency, but instead he CHOSE to use the phone repeatedly, and then CHOSE not to research the rate plans. You can't sympathize with the willfully ignorant.

However I don't think sympathy is what we were to take from this post. The problem is much bigger than Pierre and his excessive phone bill. It's the whole ATT/iPhone experience in general. iPhone customers seem to be getting special treatment and I don't mean that in a good way. The rate plans are perposterous and customer service reps aren't prepared to handle even basic iPhone questions. The simpliest of tasks such as changing your text messaging rate becomes Herculean feats when you're an iPhone customer (how many times do you need to check with your supervisor to cancel an add-on??). I actually DID call ATT about international text messaging when my ex and parents (not together) both took vacations overseas. The conversation was so infuriatingly dysfunctional and the reps were so uninformed that I threw my hands up in defeat and resorted to textless phone cards. Apple did it's job in pulling us in, now it's ATT's job to keep us. So far they're failing... miserably.

Considering AT&T offers unlimited international data use at $70 per month to its Blackberry customers, iPhone users have every right to be pissed. Attacking the user as a "crybaby" sounds more like contempt for iphone users than a legitimate criticism.

@sybil. My t-mobil pre-paid is $100 for 1000 minutes that last indefinitely, as long as I buy more minutes within the year.

The problem isnt the 205MB he used. its the 9429 minutes of talk time. look at the bill. i dont think any plan goes up that high

But it's the data transfers that got him into trouble, in which case I want to know why he needed the internet when he could've been going out in Ibiza.

Who cares what phone you have, as long as it works best for you (and that includes financially)....unless you're a materialistic schmuck

Sorry, Roger you broke now. If this dude's runnin' with bills this high its only improving my stock portfolio. Pay attention and don't beatch about what is essentially your own dumassedness.

Great, maybe we should also have a warning label on coffee pots that the contents may be hot and we should have a label on a lawnmower that reaching into it might cut your arm of, or...

Oh, never mind.

This is like buying a Hummer then bitching because "you just didn't know gas cost so much!" and demanding that Hummer refund most of your fuel expenses for a year.

Bad consumer.

i did 5Gb on my wireless card last month in the States. That's a healthy $100,000 if I'd been doing it while overseas.

MK

Two questions.. what did his Phone bill look like..

and

when did the eiffel tower move to spain?

Years ago I signed up for t-mobile, mainly because their international roaming rates were the cheapest. Before I could use it though, I had to call them and ask to have international roaming turned on for my account. The rep made sure I understood how expensive it could be. I assume a credit check of some sort was done too.

Seems simple enough to do. I'm amazed that level of roaming "just works" for AT&T by default.

So sorry to hear that Apple seems to be getting the short end of the stick on this one, but sometimes I guess it's for the better that people open their eyes after using a popular product than a crappy practice being unnoticed for the masses without a popular product.

Yikes! That's about 3 months of my salary! I'm glad he talked AT&T down to $900, but that's still outrageous. Thanks, but I'll keep my prepaid crappy looking Tracfone. It cost me $150 to get 360 minutes, and since I don't use my phone much, it's lasted me a year.

What a doof.

Even though the exact same thing happens to other unlimited U.S. data plan users with other phones, the high profile of the iPhone is making these dunderheads' idiocy reflect poorly on Apple.

And waitaminute - his previous bill was $492.00? Sounds like someone has an impulse control problem.