 elveySpamassassin
join:2001-02-17
San Francisco, CA
 ·Virgin Mobile Br..
 ·Sipgate VOIP
1 edit | NO! I'm reminded of my AT&T (Cingular) bill for a couple hundred dollars of data calls. Their records showed that I had made several of these calls during periods when my records showed that my phone was OFF. I never made any data calls at all; at the time, I just used my phone for phone calls and SMS. But they insisted, over about 5 phone calls, that their records were accurate, and that they showed that the calls had been made from my phone. I had to get the CPUC involved and leverage my security expertise to get the bill corrected.
There's a reason flat rate service has become popular. (e.g. flat rate long distance phone service didn't exist 10 years ago, now it's common.) That reason is that the customer service cost of pay-per-use is so much higher. If you're on a flat rate, you can't call and dispute having made/been billed for a phone call you didn't make.
There are university- (including MIT- ) affiliated groups that are just paid shills for various causes. This seems to be another case of that; shame on MIT for allowing it.
I sure as hell am not willing to pay for traffic I didn't ask for and don't want. If the big ISPs can stop bombarding me and my servers with massive quantities of email spam and other DoS traffic (from malicious and infected customers), I'd be willing to consider per-byte billing as perhaps reasonable. But I think they'll never stop doing that, so I don't feel there's any reason to even consider the issue further.
The big "PROBLEM" that Kamarck is trying to address is that the large public ISPs want to charge their customers more and more (in order to meet revenue growth numbers) for a service that costs less and less to provide. Yes! Provision costs continue to plummet. Fiber capacity shoots up repeatedly. Per-port router costs are stable, but the port speeds go from 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps...
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AT&T is the world's second-largest SpamHaus and leads an
Organized Crime Syndicate. Also see TURN.org or UCAN. |
