My wife was online helping me to find a replacement cell phone. My contract expired long ago and the phone is starting to show signs that it won't last much longer.
She took a detour when she noticed that our bill was higher than it usually was, and investigated why. It was about $13 difference, but $13 is $13 and we didn't want to let it go without understanding it. We might expect the price to go up occasionally as prices rise, but we shouldn't be getting charged for any additional services. My wife has an unlimited texting plan, and we have plenty of rollover minutes, so our phone bill should be pretty stable.
We tracked down the additional charges to data downloads. The date and times of the downloads didn't compute, so I called up AT&T / Cingular customer service.
(A brief aside: My experience with customer service at AT&T / Cingular today was much better than I remember it being in the past. I was pleasantly surprised.)
We eventually tracked down what the download charges were for. Somehow about a month ago we managed to subscribe to, and download, a radio application. I made sure that it wasn't someone tethering to our phone somehow. The customer service rep told me that this didn't happen by itself; someone must have initiated the download on the phone. That somebody was probably my wife, accidentally, since she's hit the wrong part of the navigation wheel on her phone in the past (and caught it before it downloaded anything).
After explaining to the rep that we didn't intend to do this, he refunded the data fees and canceled the subscription to the radio application, which was kind. Since both my wife and I were still baffled as to how this happened in the first place, I asked the rep if there was any way we could stop this from happening again.
He said there was. It's called a “data block.” Once these blocks were put on our phones, the data transfer capability was disabled until we explicitly enabled them again. We won't incur any data charges on our account because we can't.
The bottom line is this: If you don't expect to use data features on your phone, like internet access, then put a data block on your phones. This will protect against doing it accidentally like we did.
If you have a Windows Mobile phone, you can also install Modaco NoData as well. This is a free program that you can set up to block data. The good thing about it is that when/if you actually need to use data for something, you can just switch it off.
Khaleef: Good information. Our phones aren’t smart phones so we don’t really have the option to download apps. But for others this is exactly what they would want, I’m sure.
Great article and great tips. Next time, you might consider going with a no-contract provider where you can get the data plan included with the package for the same or less than you are paying now. In fact, you could take your AT&T phone and port it to Straight Talk SIM or one of many other BYOP programs starting up and save some serious coin.