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Wireless Data Subscriber Receives Bill For $1,059

An unidentified SK Telecom subscriber opened his bill one month to discover $1,059 (10 million won) worth of overage charges on his wireless data service. Apparently he thought "unlimited" actually meant "unlimited" and proceeded to munch his way through 4 Gbytes of data (equivalent to 20,000 news pages) in a single month. His plan actually had a monthly cap of 1 Gbyte. In response SK Telecom is going to prepare an alarm system for users who near their data limits.

I've gotten some whopping wireless bills in my time, but never for $1,059. The SK Telecom subscriber was using its T-Login wireless broadband service with his laptop, similar to Verizon's EV-DO-based BroadbandAccess service. Under normal usage, the T-Login service goes for $31 (30,000 won) per month. My cell phone data plan is capped at 20 Mbytes per month. The few times I've exceeded that, the bills were not so friendly. I certainly received no notification from my wireless provider before I exceeded my limit.

An official from SK Telecom competitor KTF said, "It is quite possible that users do not recognize how much they will be charged if they use the mobile Internet as if they are connected to the fixed-line network at home."

Both of the South Korean wireless providers will create a notification system that can let subscribers know when they are about to exceed their monthly limits. This is especially important, because most South Korean Web sites are graphics-intensive and average between 400 and 500 Kbytes in size. When you take SK Telecom's 20-cents-per-megabyte charge into consideration, viewing those large pages will add up to a pretty penny. (By comparison, Google's Web site is 13 Kbytes.)

As for the unlucky subscriber, there was no word on whether or not his bill was dropped. He said, however, "I had come to a conclusion that I will use it only when I’m in a desperate need for the Internet."

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