All this talk about at&t charging people outrageous prices when they are roaming in other countries is hilarious. Personally you must have been living under a damn rock for the past decade if you don’t understand that data plans are expensive as hell. But every so often there is some joker out there that didn’t get the memo and took either his phone or laptop with him to some other country or part of the country requiring roaming. This person gets a bill at the end of the month and thinks what the hell just happened someone made a mistake because I didn’t do anything different. Well bozo had you read the fine print when you signed up you would realize roaming charges are umm fucking high. That’s because the carrier needs to buy the bandwidth for your crazy data from someone and that someone is out to make money. You get granted X amount of data anything over that your provider needs to buy from someone else and that means the cost goes up usually at an insane rate. Adam Savage was the most recent celebrity who got caught up with this messy inability to read and process information problem. Here is the deal Adam claims he got hit with an 11k bill for a few hours on the internet in Canada while traveling with a USB modem. So let me break down this in to some nice easy math and I will use a recent trip I made as a comparison for amount of data. My trip was to Las Vegas not Canada but I also used a USB modem however I have an unlimited data plan on my modem, check into it because it’s great. So I went out of town for a week used a total of 918.8 MB of data. That’s a crap-ton for most normal people however I use tons of data which is why I got one that really is unlimited not this 5GB cap stuff. And I did use photoshop and change the size and quality of most photographs I uploaded to flickr. Could have easily been 4-5 times that much data had I not resized images or if I downloaded all of my mail and crap like that. So I will take a look at at&t and assume I went to Canada instead of Las Vegas. Lets also assume I was smart enough to buy the international data plan package at a crazy 100 bucks a month or so. So with this package I get a total of 5GB of data but only 100MB of international data (Canada data) a month. So we take my 918.8 MB and subtract 100 from it and we are left with 818.8 MB of data that I went over. This was all used in a week well a total of 50 hours online (connected via modem). So how much would my bill have ran if I was in Canada on at&t using their international data plan? A staggering 4,094 dollars for one week of data not counting my additional charges like modem insurance, taxes, fees, 100 dollar monthly plan, my mobile phone which could easily be well over the allotted data plan because it was used to check my mail each day and reply to a few messages. So yes, Adam, your bill for 11,000 dollars is likely real and it is likely what you actually used. But Adam started running his mouth about how it would need to be 9GB oh he would be mistaken I just showed how my less then 1GB was nearly 5k. You see the international plan only allows 100 MB per month and you are charged approx 5 dollars per MB past that. If you don’t have the international data plan you get NO allocated international data and are charged all of it and at the higher rate I assume. And when you are talking laptop data that data limit can come very quick. Emails, web pages, calendars, chats, active desktop, Microsoft automated downloads all that stuff uses data and quite fast.

Math like a crazy bumbling idiot

1MB is 1024KB

0.005 per KB is 5.12 per MB

Most expensive plan is 229.99 per month and includes 200 MB in Canada with a 0.005 per KB overage rate if you use a select carrier.

918.8 MB total used.

200.0 MB allocated in 229.99 plan

718.8 MB overage

718.8 times 5.12

3,680.256 or 3,680.26 plus 229.99 and any additional taxes and fees.

Means if you are going out of the country read up on crap. Or become a celebrity like Adam Savage and be able to throw around all the fans you have and claim how unfairly you were treated.

What likely happened with this guy Adam Savage is that he didn’t sign up for an international data plan and that means he is stuck on the standard roaming charges while outside of the country. These rates are like 3 times the international rates and you are charged for the actual data used nothing is included so lets look at my example using this likely scenario.

1 MB is 1024 KB

0.015 per KB roaming charge is 15.36 per MB

918.8 MB total used

0 allocated in plan

918.8 times 15.36 is 14112.768 or 14112.77 dollars

Nicely done my 50 hours connected would have resulted in 14k dollars in a bill plus whatever else I usually get charged for. Now we can start to see where Adam is coming from. He didn’t get an international plan, used a little less data than I did and got away with being a complete idiot because he has fans on twitter. He better start following some of those 69,000 fans instead of the 44 people he is following because those 69,000 people saved his ass from getting stuck with an 11k bill that he deserved. Everyone should keep in mind data plans are expensive especially outside the country when you go over the allocated time expect to be charged. If you are planning on traveling outside the country check with your carrier, check with people where you are going to be traveling and always read the fine print in anything you put your name on.

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Summer time is coming and in Colorado that means there are plenty of things to do here. I am not really the outdoors guy and some things will probably kill me off but none the less here are some things you can do if you are the adventurous person.

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