Verizon is finally settling with the FCC for $25 million to pay for erroneous data charges that customers were hit with over the last few years. Some customers owned phones without data plans, but were charged with data fees anyway. To avoid issues like this in the future, Verizon has given every customer a 50KB cushion so that perhaps accidental menu or button events initiated don’t incur charges.
According to PhoneScoop:
Verizon Wireless previously announced it would reimburse customers a total of $52.8 million, mostly in increments from $2 to $6 per user.
That’s a lot of dough for accidental charges. Then again, so many Verizon handsets were designed in such a manner that confused most users. An accidental press on the directional pad of a phone would sometimes take you into a portal that required data use, and suddenly you were getting charged on your bill. It was enough that one in six Verizon users – that’s close to 17% – may have been affected.
The FCC is also looking to avoid bill shock for customers in the future as it seeks to make the billing process more transparent, and for overage notifications to become standard.
[Via: PhoneScoop]