Today on his blog Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail,” answers the eternal question how to run up a $2,000 bill from AT&T for your iPhone.
Answer: go overseas. Do nothing.
Anderson explains:
the iPhone’s email app keeps automatically fetching email every ten minutes even when it’s roaming abroad. I know I am the last person on the planet to discover this, and I’m sure that it’s my fault because at some point in the past I must have gotten annoyed by the roaming data warning and turned Data Roaming on, but the way AT&T handled this mistake is insane. At around $2,000 (I didn’t know the amount at the time) they sent me a text message saying only that my “international data use is high” and that I should call a US number (at $2/minute) to “prevent a costly bill”. Needless to say, I had no idea what “high” meant, and I wasn’t inclined to incur a huge voice bill from China for the privilege of hanging on hold with customer service for the usual 20 minutes simply to find out what this text message meant.
It’s doubtful that Anderson , who’s a pretty smart guy, is indeed the “last person on the planet to discover this,” so beware BNET Intercom readers. When traveling abroad with an iPhone turn off Data Roaming by going to Settings/General/Network.
