how-to block ads
|
|
Share Topic
 |
 |
|
|
 GuspazGuspazPremium,MVM
join:2001-11-05
Montreal, QC
kudos:16 | reply to old_dawg
Re: Sure Insanely high bills are not always the fault of the user. Take my account with Fido, for example. I've got an iPhone data plan, 6GB for $30 with tethering. If I go over my cap, I pay $30/GB extra. If I leave the country and enter the US, I pay $6,292/GB extra.
Fine, you might say, just don't use your data plan while in the US. Easy.
Not so easy when you consider that the phone will simply pick the strongest signal it can find, regardless of what country it's in. Since the vast majority of the Canadian population lives within something like 150KM of the US border, you can imagine that there are occasions where your phone will decide that a US tower has a better signal than a Canadian tower, and boom; you're paying US roaming rates for usage in Canada!
I've only seen this myself when I've driven down the 401 (the major highway between Montreal and Toronto, Canada's two largest cities). At a few points, my phone jumped to US networks.
Luckily, the iPhone has an option to disable international data roaming, so I don't need to worry about that, although I could still get billed the ridiculous voice roaming rate if I was making (or in the middle of) a call. | |
cghh
join:2001-01-15
Milpitas, CA
1 edit | said by Guspaz:Not so easy when you consider that the phone will simply pick the strongest signal it can find, regardless of what country it's in. Since the vast majority of the Canadian population lives within something like 150KM of the US border, you can imagine that there are occasions where your phone will decide that a US tower has a better signal than a Canadian tower, and boom; you're paying US roaming rates for usage in Canada! Doesn't the GSM protocol have the notion of priorities among candidate systems? With CDMA, the Preferred Roaming List prioritizes various systems, with the phone hanging onto a higher priority system until it is essentially unusable, no matter if a lower priority system has a much stronger signal. | | |
|
|
