Hewlett Harbor man racks up $4,800 iPhone bill
BY RICHARD J. DALTON, JR. | richard.dalton@newsday.com
5:49 PM CDT, September 7, 2007
Jay Levy and his family took their iPhones on a Mediterranean cruise. Now the Hewlett Harbor entrepreneur feels as if he got taken for a ride, receiving a 54-page monthly bill of nearly $4,800 from AT&T Wireless.
While Levy, his wife and his daughter were enjoying the trip, and even while they were sleeping, their three iPhones were racking up a bill for data charges. The iPhone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off, so that all the messages will be available when the user turns it on.
"They have periodic updates on their data files, and they translate into megabucks," Levy said. "This is akin to your bank having automatic access to your ATM machine and is siphoning money out during all times of the day and night without your knowledge."
Levy and his daughter each have three e-mail accounts on their iPhones, and they were each billed more than $1,900.
His wife's phone had one e-mail account, and her bill hit $890. One connection alone ran $223. Levy said he has complained all the way to office of AT&T's president.
Data transfers are not a problem domestically, where the AT&T Wireless plan includes unlimited data transfers for the iPhone.
But the iPhone's international plan in 29 countries, mostly in Europe, costs $24.99 for 20 megabytes. In countries outside the plan, charges can run from $5 to $20 per megabyte, said Ben Wilson, editor of iPhone Atlas, a Web site owned by the online news company CNet.
"It was a big surprise," Wilson said. "Consumers didn't expect that the charges were going to be so high and that the phone was going to be doing all this data transfer in the background that they weren't aware of."
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