Apple had better lean on AT&T.

Even though the exact same thing happens to other unlimited U.S. data plan users with other phones, the high profile of the iPhone is making these dunderheads' idiocy reflect poorly on Apple.

And waitaminute - his previous bill was $492.00? Sounds like someone has an impulse control problem.

Seems suitable that the kind of person who would have an iPhone is the same kind of person so boneheaded that he doesn't know the details of his phone plan, or the consequences of ridiculous international charges.

What a doof.

Yikes! That's about 3 months of my salary! I'm glad he talked AT&T down to $900, but that's still outrageous. Thanks, but I'll keep my prepaid crappy looking Tracfone. It cost me $150 to get 360 minutes, and since I don't use my phone much, it's lasted me a year.

205MB, over EDGE/GPRS? Sounds like a hell of a vacation... guy must have been playing with his iPhone the whole two weeks.

I'm surprised that people didn't know that the international roaming rates are ludicrously high. I thought it was a well known fact.

So sorry to hear that Apple seems to be getting the short end of the stick on this one, but sometimes I guess it's for the better that people open their eyes after using a popular product than a crappy practice being unnoticed for the masses without a popular product.

His previous bill was $492???

Years ago I signed up for t-mobile, mainly because their international roaming rates were the cheapest. Before I could use it though, I had to call them and ask to have international roaming turned on for my account. The rep made sure I understood how expensive it could be. I assume a credit check of some sort was done too.

Seems simple enough to do. I'm amazed that level of roaming "just works" for AT&T by default.

Two questions.. what did his Phone bill look like..

and

when did the eiffel tower move to spain?

200 megabytes on a phone? What the hell was he browsing?

euro porn maybe?

You HAVE to ascertain your plan and what it covers and where.

MK

i did 5Gb on my wireless card last month in the States. That's a healthy $100,000 if I'd been doing it while overseas.

Not smart at all. He is lucky they only charged him $900.

So he didn't bother checking the rates.

This is like buying a Hummer then bitching because "you just didn't know gas cost so much!" and demanding that Hummer refund most of your fuel expenses for a year.

Bad consumer.

[quote]should come up warning customers of the high costs you could be incurring.[/quote]

Great, maybe we should also have a warning label on coffee pots that the contents may be hot and we should have a label on a lawnmower that reaching into it might cut your arm of, or...

Oh, never mind.

No sympathy for the parade of people who have "found out the hard way just how extremely expensive international data transfer rates are." They could have found out the easy way by simply reading their plan. Cry babies.

Sorry, Roger you broke now. If this dude's runnin' with bills this high its only improving my stock portfolio. Pay attention and don't beatch about what is essentially your own dumassedness.

People really should read he contracts they get into. It is already well known that the icrapphone has high international roaming charges--honestly, if you know the blackberry unlimited is that much better, get it to begin with.

Who cares what phone you have, as long as it works best for you (and that includes financially)....unless you're a materialistic schmuck

Why is it only college students seem to know to buy cheap pre-pay phones when traveling in Europe?

But it's the data transfers that got him into trouble, in which case I want to know why he needed the internet when he could've been going out in Ibiza.

The problem isnt the 205MB he used. its the 9429 minutes of talk time. look at the bill. i dont think any plan goes up that high

An iPhone owner named Pierre created a fake iPhone commercial showing his REAL $4190.76 iPHONE BILL from ATT.(props to...

Man, I do dig that photo viewer on the iPhone but its not worth leaving WM.

In regards to T-mobile offering a better roaming rate than AT&T, keep in mind that Deutsche Telekom bought T-mobile, so they can allow people to roam in Europe either on their own networks or through roaming partnerships that are part of it's presence in Europe.

Considering AT&T offers unlimited international data use at $70 per month to its Blackberry customers, iPhone users have every right to be pissed. Attacking the user as a "crybaby" sounds more like contempt for iphone users than a legitimate criticism.

@sybil. My t-mobil pre-paid is $100 for 1000 minutes that last indefinitely, as long as I buy more minutes within the year.

@raficab: Maybe he left his phone on "speakerphone" during the entire time he was awake during his trip. That's like 6.5 days worth of minutes.

What a moron.

@Pope John Peeps II: Attacking a consumer for well... being a consumer is rather juvenille don't you thing? Some people choose to spend $500 on a pda that's buy one get one free in a matter of months while others (such as Pierre) prefer to invest that money on a piece of technology that will hold it's value for it's entire existance. A post such as yours that has little to nothing to do with the subject at hand and is little more than a poorly masked iPhone jab doesn't shine badly on the phone or its users, but instead reveals you as a petty, spiteful person and negates whatever substance that possibly could've been pulled from your comment.

With that being said I really don't have too much sympathy for this guy. I'd understand if it was a one time thing where he was in a bind and needed to use the internet for some sort of emergency, but instead he CHOSE to use the phone repeatedly, and then CHOSE not to research the rate plans. You can't sympathize with the willfully ignorant.

However I don't think sympathy is what we were to take from this post. The problem is much bigger than Pierre and his excessive phone bill. It's the whole ATT/iPhone experience in general. iPhone customers seem to be getting special treatment and I don't mean that in a good way. The rate plans are perposterous and customer service reps aren't prepared to handle even basic iPhone questions. The simpliest of tasks such as changing your text messaging rate becomes Herculean feats when you're an iPhone customer (how many times do you need to check with your supervisor to cancel an add-on??). I actually DID call ATT about international text messaging when my ex and parents (not together) both took vacations overseas. The conversation was so infuriatingly dysfunctional and the reps were so uninformed that I threw my hands up in defeat and resorted to textless phone cards. Apple did it's job in pulling us in, now it's ATT's job to keep us. So far they're failing... miserably.

Thought so..

On The Street (Wall Street), there were estimates that the overall expenditure for a customer that has a 2 year contract would be about $3K to 6K American.

I'm disappointed in how at&t has set this massive honey trap up for us. And how many have gotten sucked into it.

Let us prey upon the iPhone's weaknesses my friends, unlock it's hidden potential and unleash all of its service options. Give the appliance true life that it truly deserves!

Allow at&t to wallow in the spoils of their marketing victory. But they will burn from the many wounds of the aftermath.

People are acting 205 megs is a huge number. It isn't. Just visiting the Consumerist home page and clicking over to this page is about 1.2 megs, or $5.83 at the $.005 per kB rate mentioned in a previous post on this subject.

$5.83 to view two rather ordinary web-pages is ridiculous. The fact that the iPhone views "the real internet" rather than a down-rezzed proxy is a distinct disadvantage when it comes to your overseas use of the phone.

...and an additional $2.3 for the refresh when I submitted the comment (an additional 460 kB for a total of aprox 1.6 megs): now it's $8.13

(9429 min / 60 min/hr) / 30 days = 5.24 hours/day.

5 hours a day of voice for a whole month? Freaking insane. That's like 1/3 of your waking hours. And he was on VACATION for half of that month?

I'm surprised AT&T retroactively added him to an international data plan.

Where's the "dumb consumer" tag? This story deserves it. Always ask what the charges/prices will be. Never ASSume that things will remain the same after you've left your home area.

I bet this same person thinks that their US Constitutional rights & US laws apply to him in foreign countries as well.

I'm also a bit skeptical about the minutes used. There's only 10,000 minutes (168 hrs) in a week!

I was recently in Italy for 2 weeks, with my iPhone. I signed up for the international plan that they signed him up for retroactively. My bill still came out to over $2000. My company pays for my service and knew that bill would be expensive. I tried talking them down a bit but they wouldn't budge.

@zouxou: I'm the one who called him a cry baby and I love the iPhone. If he had a legit gripe based on the Blackberry (and I agree iPhone users do), he should have raised it BEFORE he incurred the charges, rather than after. My criticism is legitimate. He acted irresponsibly.

@Hawk07: Me too. Seriously, has this guy not heard of just leaving his phone behind for a vacation?

Of course, the $4190.76 could include $200 in shipping charges for what must be a four-thousand-page bill, given that the "average" iPhone user is seeing 30-, 40-, or even 50-page bills.

I highly recommend buying a phone, as somebody said above, in the country you're visiting. I have a French cell phone that I leave with friends in France. I got it for 75 eu about five years ago. Just bought a new battery for it on eBay for about $5. When I'm in Paris, if I'm there for a week, I buy only a 10 eu mobicarte (at a tobacconist) and mostly have friends call me. Calls in are free. If I'm talkative, I'll get a 35 eu card, which comes with, I think, 5 minutes free. I think it might cost about 50 cents a minute to call out, but not really a big deal considering the rates of US cell phones used in Europe. And then, if you're making a reservation, you also have a Paris number to be called back on.

Here's a 39 eu phone via Orange, the company I use. That's the price to buy the phone without a subscrip. Great deal.

[www.orange.fr]

Everyone's forgetting to notice the important point: it is possible to use the iPhone's data features far away from AT&T's network... This means that edge is working great over there. I see a hack coming.

he shouldn't have been watching all that gay porn over there.

If someone had developed BitTorrent for iPhone, he might owe billions!

Wow he is way over spending for his number of minutes. 9000+ roll over minutes time to trim your calling plan back too.

Whether or not this guy should have researched his rates, his problem was not that he spent an entire week on the phone - those 9000 odd minutes are his rollover minutes from previous months. NOT the amount of time he spent talking on the phone while in europe.

I agree that the consumer here is quite dumb. But I would think the big loser is Apple. This kind of publicity has to scare some people away. Why they would lock in exclusivity with any one cellular carrier is beyond me.

This guy is irresponsible, but AT&T isn't any better. They charged me $800 in long distance fees two months (consecutively) even after I called after the 1st month to correct the issue. Oh by the way I was only making calls from Philadelphia to Baltimore, and both areas were covered in my plan. Then, they politely shut off my cell phone services because I wouldn't pay the bill, and then they attempted to charge me a re-connect fee, and they wondered why I wanted to terminate my contract with them, hmmmm...
And yes, their customer service was quite remarkable, HA!

Even if the guy did know, did he have a choice? I mean, unlike most other phones, unlocking the iPhone to use a local SIM with better data rates isn't exactly for the faint of heart.

The whole "Blackberry has an unlimited international data plan" whine is entirely irrelevant to this situation since the chap never bothered to call in and ask about international service in the first place. The standard Blackberry data plan does not include any international service.

Should there be an international option for the iPhone? Definitely. Wouldn't have done much for Captain Assumption here, though.

Honestly, the man should have known better. But that has GOT to hurt.

\/\/

Is it possible for the iPhone to work off Wifi like the Skype phones? (And be free in those circumstances?) In Paris, for example, they have free Wifi in an increasing number of parks.