9 Gigs in a few hours. And at 3G speeds. That's not bad at all. A hour of a Hulu HD stream is less than 1 gig. I would have trouble doing that on my regular connection.

I'll roam if I want to. Roam around the world.

9 Gigs at 1.7Mb/s (THEORETICAL maximum of the Mercury) is 11.7 hours of solid usage, at 100% capacity.

I'm going to call BS on AT&T here.

Best part is at the quoted .015 cents per kb he should owe far less than $11,000 even if he did stream 9Gb.

Theoretical yes, at 100% LOGICAL capacity (a little bit different than engineering where it's plus or minus a few percentage points), but I seriously doubt that Adam could have hosed that much pipe running streaming bandwidth.
P2P, maybe, but then again, I doubt he would have put it at full cap.

and Time Warner wanted to cap broadband at 40GB a month.... (ya, i know, TW backed off)

"And I got the "data is charged at .015 cents, or a penny and a half, per kb". About to try to explain the difference to them. Sigh."

I remember reading in the past about other people trying to win that battle. I assumed they failed since AT&T is still having problems converting cents to dollars.

I am very curious how this will play out. Are they going to be firm, or let him off easy? AT&T (any cell co.) now is in a lose-lose situation. 1, you alienate a bunch of people for not backing down to a 'famous' person. Or 2, you have to eat major crow and waive the fee along with MANY other peoples fees.

If you are roaming, either turn it off, or man up to the fees.

I smell a new myth to bust!

@TheName: Wasn't there an article a while back where AT&T couldn't understand the difference between .015cents per minute and .015 dollars per minute?

@Corporate_guy: that is why it was just called "Verizon Math". AT&T has now stepped up it's game!

@Sian: That was Verizon and it was 0.02 :)

@Smashville:
Well, just remember roam wasn't billed for a day.

(really sorry, just couldn't hold it in)

@thefezman: Wouldn't it take nearly 13 hours to do that much data, maxing out the connection?

@Kevin Wolf: Here's a link: [consumerist.com]

It was over the difference between being charged $0.015 per KB when the quoted rate was $0.00015 per KB, the former being one-and-a-half (1.5) cents, the latter being one-and-a-half hundredths (.015) of a cent.

It was hilarious. Too bad the audio is no longer available.

@Smashville: When traveling, nothing beats a roam with a view.

@Stannous Flouride: +1

@TheName: At .015 cents per KB, 9 GB = 9,437,184 KB = $1415.58

But if its .015 cents per Kb, then it comes out to $11,324.64.

But his twitter is the exact same x100 magnitude problem that verizon had with 0.015 cents per kb ≠ a penny and a half per kb.

@coren: Next week on Mythbusters: Can ATT do math?

*spoiler: it gets busted*

@Smashville: OMG B52's!!!

@donttrythis Today the tweeps became twoops. Just got off the phone with AT&T and they've taken care of everything to my great satisfaction.#twitterrules

It looks like he got the problem fixed. I'm not too shocked. He says that it's basically because of twitter that the problem is fixed. So, if I'm not a star but I have the same problem, my guess is that AT&T completely fails. Yayyyyy, nothing solved. Ever.

AT&T got in contact with Adam after he got 50,000 people to retweet his message. His phone and 3G modem's back on, and it's impressed AT&T at the following.

I was gone in Los Angeles for a whole month and I had used my EVDO A phone as a modem, streamed movies, music, and did constant web pages, emails, pictures, etc, even streamed music to the phone directly for 9 hours a day...YES BELIEVE IT...

I did not even break 5GB!

And at $0.03 per kb it would be about $125,829.12 for roughly the amount Ive used.. ALL MONTH. There is NO WAY that he could have used 11GB in a few hours! Not on Rogers HSPA network, and certainly not at 1600kbps AVERAGE speed.

@rwalford79: B52s rock, ive seen them live twice now, both times unintentionally though.

I'm having a similar problem this month. My wife and I are now stationed on opposite sides of the country. She was having trouble getting internet where she is now, but had a great 3G signal, so went to AT&T and got one of those USB wireless devices. She was never told that there was a data transfer limit, and it was nowhere in the documents she signed.

Fast-forward 2 weeks, and after a couple Skype sessions of an hour or so, we bust the 5 Gig limit. We now have a $1240 bill. My wife went to return the device and cancel service (since it had only been 3 weeks since she got it). The charges were supposed to go away, but they are still there.

Too bad I don't have 50,000 twitter followers so I can get stuff taken care of that fast too :(

@Aladdyn:

??
How do you see them unintentionally?

I used to work for AT&T and I know what the problem is here. We used to encounter it quite often in international cases, especially when the iPhone came out.

You aren't thinking in _METRIC_ GB. 1 GB = 10 MB = 100 KB = $$$.

Seriously, when I was there, there was both the 1.5 cents per kb and the 0.015/kb in our rules and training, which had to be followed verbatim. I cut the difference and said checking email would cost a few dollars and emailed them the step-by-step directions for turning the internet off.

I don't understand how these wireless providers can have such absurd calculations of usage. If they're usage numbers are wrong when you're roaming, how do we know they aren't charging us for minutes/bandwidth we never used while at home?!

@TheName:
[verizonmath.blogspot.com]

@Chuck Thorne: Comment win.

Maybe phones should be required to have a running readout of bandwidth used and accumulating charges if they're roaming.

Nobody would use a gas pump that doesn't tell you how much you owe until you're done filling up, so if cell companies want to charge the crap out of people for roaming data, they should be required to show what the cost is.

I know from experience that ATT can and potentially will reduce the charges, even if they are 100% your fault. I used to work as a personal assistant for a woman who travelled around Europe for 2 weeks using her ATT modem to occasionally check emails. She was completely computer illiterate and was definitely not surfing the web at any point. Her bill was $4500 when she got home and she was able to talk them down to around $600. Her only defense was that she simply did not know the data usage fees, or else she obviously would not have used her modem while abroad. She was extremely nice and polite on the phone and maybe got lucky with a rep who was having a good day. Either way- it IS possible to get the charges reversed, and worth giving it a shot if you find yourself in the same situation.

@☠Grяrяrяrяrя sings the doom song now!: Best iPhone app idea ever!

"If you sign up with AT&T for service, they will eventually screw you."

Myth... or Fact?

Uh, Fact. Their customer "service" people will hide behind "policy," "the computer says," or the favorite: "YOU NEED TO CALL..." (some other clueless AT&T department, there are BILLIONS.)

If you're a business customer your rep will have been promising you a bill credit "to resolve everything" if you just sign the contract renewing services for X number of years. S/He will be reassigned immediately after the new contract has been executed - and then your promised credit will be denied. The new rep will act helpless and pretend to feel bad that "management" has done this to you. Not to worry though! If your new contract was for two years your "new" rep will string you along about another "credit" for 23-ish months. It repeats.

RUN away from AT&T. The honeymoon might last a couple of months but it's not WORTH IT!

@☠Grяrяrяrяrя sings the doom song now!: My Toshiba has this. In fact, just about every Japanese phone does. Then again, their local providers help too; one of them offers a $2/MB roaming rate for its users on AT&T (though the fact that said provider helped AT&T make 3G happen for Hawaiians is probably why).

@HogwartsAlum: Show up for an airplane demonstration at a local outdoor festival and get hit with a little Love Shack instead.

@Chuck Thorne: By gum you're right! Everyone is thinking in imperial measurements, but Canada is metric. So you have to convert these GBs into litres first.

I can't wait to see the episode of Mythbusters that deals with data roaming!

@jamar0303: Although said rate only extends to 15MB or so (they count data usage by the packet- fun). But still, if only AT&T would extend such a courtesy to roamers to Canada.

@Miss_Ingperson: It would be a lot more useful than many of them.

@jamar0303: Every phone should have such a thing. I'm sick of companies shrugging their shoulders and saying "You should have read the 75 pages of legal fine print in your service agreement" and then leaving people with $10,000 bills.

That would be like arresting people for speeding even though the one and only speed limit sign was hidden behind a tree 300 miles ago.

@SabreDC:

Ah! I see.

@HogwartsAlum: The first time was during earth day way back when in NYC, I was there with my parents and they happened to be playing in Central park so we stayed and watched them. Second time was last year, my wife likes the band Tegan and Sarah and they were playing in the true colors tour at Foxwoods casino, so I got tickets then found out B52's were playing also.

@dallasmay: The 3G connection in Canada must be WAY faster than AT&T's connection in the states as 9 GB in 3 hours seems impossible based on my tethering experiences in which I have never gotten faster than 40kb/second.

@☠Grяrяrяrяrя sings the doom song now!: That'll end up being "technically not possible," because it prevents them from f**king you over with obscene charges.

@ludwigk: For someone who did so much math, you did not pre-read your comment before you posted.

@☠Grяrяrяrяrя sings the doom song now!: Even without providing a running readout of charges, I can't believe that they don't cut you off after $500 or so, and make you call to tell them that yes, indeed, you know you are going to get a several thousand dollar charge for what you are doing.

@sven.kirk:

In most cases they'll lower it to a more "reasonable" amount (which is still way too high) in the hopes that you'll just give in.

But... due to the fact that not only has this been made public AND it's from a celebrity, it's also on the "hottest" new social network. Don't take what happens in this case as the usual scenario; PR people are already at work with their Starbucks coffee and designer handbags scattered on the table looking at the best way to "spin" this.