A recent invoice demonstrated how rude and counterproductive the current (mobile) data caps practices are. It is amazing that mobile operators can get away with this, how arrogant and deaf can you be regarding your customers.
As someone who travels a lot for my work I have shifted to public transportation, an extra battery and a HDSPA dongle. A good combination for a mobile warrior.
For my mobile data subscription I use Maximum Online from Telfort. It used to have one of the largest dataplans, 1 Gbyte a month. (Recently some providers like Vodafone have differentiated their dataplans, up to 3,5 GByte a month).
November was a month with a lot of travelling, working on a project for a specific wiki. Discussions with the designer on the look-and-feel of the website required a lot of emails with JPG's, which probably spiked my data usage.
The result: an invoice for an overrun of 233 Mbyte ( 23 % above the 1000 Mbyte allowance) with a penalty of 350 % on my normal invoice.
Let's see:
- no tools for tracking my usage during the month
- no averaging over a longer period of time than a month
- no signals, like an email "you have reached 70 % of your allowance"
- no upgrade marketing like "we notice you are a heavy user, we recommend an upgrade to package ABC
Right. Let's shop for another provider who isn't autistic.
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