3 ms·

What I hate most in such cases is that the telco will just sit silent until it presents you an insane bill at the end of the month. How hard is it to implement

by raquo 15y ago

What I hate most in such cases is that the telco will just sit silent until it presents you an insane bill at the end of the month. How hard is it to implement a system that would compare each customer's last day's spending with their own 75-percentile daily spending over last 30 days and alert them of extraordinary activity? That would prevent 70% of such problems. 99% if something similar was implemented for roaming charges.

dorianj 15y ago
My university does this, and sends me an email the second my bandwidth usage is showing 'unusual activity', usually triggered by skype (since it uploads a lot). So, not too hard.
- m_myers 15y ago
  But your university gives you a flat fee for bandwidth, does it not? If so, then their incentive is to help you use less. A telco which offers per-GB rates would rather you use more.
jbooth 15y ago
Well, what's their incentive to set something like that up? It would hurt their bottom line to be that good of a citizen.
- afterburner 15y ago
  Exactly, so in this case the consequences to the convicted woman was a double whammy: the huge bill exaggerated the scale of her crime, which meant the uncompassionate legal system punished her with a jail term to match the "damages". The legal system failed both in its discretionary punishment and in regulating the telco enough to avoid this situation and protect consumers.
mcn 15y ago
Agreed. It appears that she was averaging a $4k+/day bill -- it shouldn't take 4 months to notice that something is wrong with that.
tptacek 15y ago
While I agree with your sentiment, we aren't talking about an MNO's business-to-consumer billing relationship; we're talking about the vastly-more-complicated relationship the MNO has with an electrical utility. By way of comparison, if I accidentally spin up 4x as many EC2 large instances as I needed, I don't believe Amazon has a system to send me a message saying "you are doing something dumb, stop it".

by raquo 15y ago

dorianj 15y ago

My university does this, and sends me an email the second my bandwidth usage is showing 'unusual activity', usually triggered by skype (since it uploads a lot). So, not too hard.

m_myers 15y ago
But your university gives you a flat fee for bandwidth, does it not? If so, then their incentive is to help you use less. A telco which offers per-GB rates would rather you use more.

jbooth 15y ago

Well, what's their incentive to set something like that up? It would hurt their bottom line to be that good of a citizen.

afterburner 15y ago
Exactly, so in this case the consequences to the convicted woman was a double whammy: the huge bill exaggerated the scale of her crime, which meant the uncompassionate legal system punished her with a jail term to match the "damages". The legal system failed both in its discretionary punishment and in regulating the telco enough to avoid this situation and protect consumers.

mcn 15y ago

Agreed. It appears that she was averaging a $4k+/day bill -- it shouldn't take 4 months to notice that something is wrong with that.

tptacek 15y ago

While I agree with your sentiment, we aren't talking about an MNO's business-to-consumer billing relationship; we're talking about the vastly-more-complicated relationship the MNO has with an electrical utility. By way of comparison, if I accidentally spin up 4x as many EC2 large instances as I needed, I don't believe Amazon has a system to send me a message saying "you are doing something dumb, stop it".