 marigoldsGainfully employed, finallyPremium,MVM join:2002-05-13 Saint Louis, MO kudos:2 | What's a data session? So, in looking through the data plan TOS, I noticed this all caps tidbit:
DATA TRANSPORT IS BILLED IN FULL-KILOBYTE INCREMENTS, AND ACTUAL TRANSPORT IS ROUNDED UP TO THE NEXT FULL-KILOBYTE INCREMENT AT THE END OF EACH DATA SESSION FOR BILLING PURPOSES. AT&T CHARGES A FULL KILOBYTE OF DATA TRANSPORT FOR EVERY FRACTION OF THE LAST KILOBYTE OF DATA TRANSPORT USED ON EACH DATA SESSION. »www.wireless.att.com/learn/messa···ices.jsp Which leads to this question... what is a data session? Is it when I sign on and sign off again (it's not, AT&T does not have a direct way to track this)? Is it a distinct period of inactivity? Is it every new type of activity? Is it every single download initiated? I don't know, because it is not defined anywhere in the services terms and conditions. Not in the page above. Not at »www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-···erms.jsp. Not here »www.wireless.att.com/businesscen···able.jsp. Not here »www.wireless.att.com/businesscen···8308.pdf.
And this is not even getting AT&Tcharging you for network overhead and packet resends (even if they never reach you). Which means that even if you monitor your usage at the laptop, you have no way of knowing how much that usage has inflated from bad packets on the network. Imagine getting a network timeout the first time you try to access google maps. The google maps base page is 320KB. You might have just spent $4.80 on a page you never even saw. Get a greyed out tile? It still cost you 35 cents, and will cost you another 35 cents to reload it. -- ISCABBS - the oldest and largest BBS on the Internet telnet://bbs.iscabbs.com Professional Geographer Geographic Information Science researcher |