Kerfye Pierre, a 27 year old woman from Washington state, chose to volunteer her time and energy towards helping to rebuild Haiti after the massive earthquake that struck the country earlier this year. She brought her mobile phone with her, and unaware of the concept of roaming charges, used it like she regularly would back home. When she finally came back to Washington she got a bill from T-Mobile in the amount of $35,000. “I was like, ‘That cannot be possible,” she told CNN. “And I called them and they were like, ‘Yeah, that’s your bill.'” she added.
She thought her bill would be close to zero since it was understood that her and other Americans helping out Haitians would be given free service. Turns out that people would be given free voice service, but Kerfye, like most people under 30, communicates via text messages. T-Mobile says that they were pretty clear with the details of their reduced pricing, but in Kerfye’s case they’ve chopped her bill down to $5,000, which still sounds pretty excessive considering what she’s selflessly decided to do while most other Americans just sat in front of their monster high definition televisions, watching the destruction from the comfort of their sofas.
Stories such as this are why the FCC is trying to figure out how to reduce “bill shock“. It’s already been proven, by two separate organizations [1, 2], that Americans pay some of the highest phone bills in the world. Ignorance to roaming charges and not being alerted after a certain debt amount is reached are to blame for people going abroad and coming home to a piece of paper that could potentially give them a heart attack. Why roaming charges exist in the first place is beyond me. We’re in 2010 and bandwidth in plentiful, yet the old way of billing customers lives on.