Aussie MP slapped with $10k phone bill
Son downloads games on his iPhone
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
An Australian politician was slapped with a $10,500 phone bill after his 12-year-old son downloaded soccer and AFL games on his iPhone.
Russell Wortley, a member of South Australia's Upper House, doesn't see his mobile bill, usually $200 a month - the tab is picked up by tax payers. He was told the news on Friday by Parliamentary officials, who approve expenses.
"I was absolutely staggered", Wortley told Adelaide Now.
"My normal bill is less than $200 and I am still in shock at getting a bill for more than $10,000," he said. "There were huge sums being charged over relatively short periods, in one case $4000 for one hour and six minutes of use for a download, in another case $3000. My son had used the phone to download what were advertised as free sports games such as soccer and football, but because of the plan we were on Telstra charged for the downloads."
Wortley was unlikely to have had a data browsing pack, which means he was charged $2 for every megabyte his son downloaded. Ouch. "Even if the application is free the data to download isn't," a Telstra spokesman told Adelaide Now.
Wortley is trying to renegotiate the bill with Telstra - otherwise he has to stump up the money himself. We guess he has better bargaining power than most... ®
COMMENTS
Something doesn't sound right
$10,500, if charged at the suggested $2 per MB, that's about 5GB of data. That's the sort of usage from LOT of browsing on a 3G modem on a laptop, not the data associated with downloading a couple of mobile phone games, or even the sorts of data downloaded within a mobile game.
Assholes go by the book
Yes, Telstra are entirely within their rights to just say "give us what you owe", but doing this when a story gets to the media, they end up looking like right gits. Which is pretty bad for PR.
This is why you often hear of companies making "good-will gestures". Effectively paying off the complaining punter to appease the media and PR people, without setting any precedent.
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Data control in the cloud
Cloud based data management
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
