Not long after I returned from a recent trip to Canada, I was surprised to find a $400 cell phone bill in the mailbox. This seemed odd because I'd made only two phone calls when I was there, the longer one for 15 minutes.
But when I looked closer at the breakdown, I saw what was going on. It wasn't I who'd been making dozens of long-distance calls back to the States - it was the phone itself. While I thought my iPhone was sitting "unused" in my jacket, it had been constantly checking my e-mail for 72 consecutive hours.
You see, using a data-enabled cell phone in a foreign land has become a little like falling asleep on a train in Naples - if you're not careful, you could end up with empty pockets. If you ever have, you know the feeling.
"Shock, fear, panic," said Mike Cottmeyer, a software consultant in Suwanee, Ga., referring to an $800 iPhone data bill he'd been hit with after visiting Toronto for a few days last year. "It kind of makes you sick to your stomach."
The roaming rip-off stems from a sad new kind of Catch-22: With all the contracts, agreements and stipulations we've signed on for, there's more fine print than ever and less time to read it. And like a high-schooler's nightmare, if you fail to memorize everything, you could be in big trouble.
The iPhone is more laptoplike than most other phones, so its users are more likely to use them for big graphical Web pages. But the price of roaming data isn't unique to the iPhone, so anyone with a Web-enabled phone who is unsure about roaming costs should do a little homework before they go out of the country.
For an idea of how easy it is for travelers to rack up a nauseating data bill, consider that most phone companies charge roaming customers about 2 cents per kilobyte. How much is that? Well, your average e-mail message might be 10 kb. So that's about 20 cents per e-mail. Not instantly fatal.
Well, what if someone sends you a message with a snapshot in it - that might run a megabyte or two (about 2,000 kb). So while the picture of your nephew in his first snowstorm might be priceless in one sense, in another it just cost you 40 bucks.
But even that is child's play. The real action comes when travelers use their phones to surf the Web or watch videos - both of which can consume thousands of times more data than checking e-mail. The blogosphere is littered with ghastly tales of "bill shock" over such unanticipated fees, like the American who visited London for two weeks, bringing his Web-enabled iPhone, not a laptop, for all computing needs. The price tag on that bit of light traveling? $3,000.
