… expect a cell phone bill like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Tom spent ten days in Israel last month, at Microsoft headquarters in Haifa, Eilat and Tel Aviv. He took his Verizon cell phone with him, although he couldn’t get voice service to work. It’s probably just as well.

He did check his email a couple of times per day, resulting in 28KB of data usage. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Well, when I got the bill today, my jaw dropped. That 28KB cost us $574 – not including the considerable taxes and surcharges. By way of contrast, during the same month he had 121MB (121,000KB) of data usage here at home, which cost $44.99 (as part of the unlimited data plan).

 
My jaw-dropping Verizon Wireless bill
(Click to enlarge)

Now, he knew there would be roaming charges – but he logically assumed they would be the same or similar to the roaming charges in Israel for voice service, which is listed on the Verizon web site as $1.29 per minute. Apparently not.

Nowhere on the Verizon site can I find anything warning me that they charge $20 for one kilobyte of data usage when roaming in Israel. We’re a bit pissed off, but we’re also thankful that it wasn’t a lot worse. If he’d left the phone set to automatically check mail every fifteen minutes like it does here at home, we might have had to sell the house to pay the cell phone bill.

Tom noticed that a colleague who was in Israel with him, who has Sprint service, got a text message from Sprint warning him that he was in roam mode and telling him what the charges would be. Overall I like Verizon a lot, and based on what I’ve heard from others about other aspects of their service, I’d never switch to Sprint, but I certainly wish Verizon would take a tip from them on this issue. Suddenly having to switch to AT&T to get the iPhone doesn’t seem quite as bad an idea as it did yesterday.

deb@shinder.net