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Roseman: Your wireless phone tells you when roaming charges get too high
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Toronto Star- Rogers Communications is going to notify customers about the high bills they can get when travelling with a smart phone outside Canada.
Bill shocks arise if you don’t turn off the phone’s data roaming feature after crossing the border. You may not know that some applications keep updating themselves in the background, pushing up your charges.
You can also get dinged if you buy a data roaming package that is too small for your needs, forcing you to pay overage fees if you exceed the limits.
With the launch of real-time data usage alerts, Rogers is letting clients see the cost of what they’re doing while away.
By monitoring their usage, they can avoid piling up hundreds or thousands of dollars in roaming charges — or getting cut off because of the high bills they rack up.
Rogers will now send flashing text messages to customers when they start using data outside Canada, telling them they can buy roaming data passes with rates starting at $5 a day.
It’s also putting caps on data use at 30 MB in the United States and 10 MB internationally. When customers reach the limit, they have to buy a data pass or specifically opt out of buying a data pass.
“There’s a balance between notifying the customer and being intrusive,” says Raj Doshi, vice-president of mobile data management.
“We don’t know a customer’s situation. We don’t want to cut them off if they need to keep using their phones. It’s not a good solution.”
Bell Canada introduced real-time alerts for data roaming last month, said spokesman Jason Laszlo.
A text message is sent when customers reach certain data usage thresholds (2, 10, 50 and 100 MB), offering a toll-free number to get details and sign up for a data roaming plan.
“Upon reaching 100 MB, data roaming service is suspended,” Laszlo said, “and can be restored either at the customer’s request or automatically after 30 days from the start of their data roaming.”
Telus, another major wireless supplier, doesn’t offer data roaming plans because it doesn’t believe in them.
“The ‘pass’ construct is fundamentally broken because customer awareness of passes is low,” said Brent Johnston, Telus vice-president of mobility solutions.
“Also, clients need to know precisely how much data they’re going to use to get the advertised savings.”
Telus offers low pay-per-use rates to clients as soon as they arrive in a foreign country, delivering the best price regardless of usage, Johnston said.
Mobilicity, a newer wireless carrier, forces customers to pay in advance for any services they use outside of their plans.
“They never get a surprise bill,” said president Dave Dobbin about the virtual wallets that clients use to cover any extra services they want.
Roaming charges are “a massive profit driver” for Canada’s established wireless carriers, Dobbin insisted.
“Why don’t they just lower the price to a reasonable amount? Why don’t they just stop overcharging customers?”
Mobilicity’s data roaming rates are lower than Rogers’ rates for its new daily and weekly passes, he said. And Rogers customers can lose the data they pay for in advance if they don’t use it.
Complaints about surprise data roaming charges have reached a fever pitch in recent months. I’ve helped dozens of Toronto Star readers cut their bills by intervening with the major wireless carriers.
It’s clear that many people — even seasoned business executives who should know better — don’t understand how the system works.
“There’s a vast amount of education that needs to happen in this area,” says Doshi of Rogers.
In my view, the major wireless carriers added real-time alerts to quell the mounting furor over bill shock and head off government intervention.
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