At 13 Feb 2007 13:53:44 -0800 Al wrote:
> Unfortunately, I just received a bill from Amigo, which charged me an
> astronomical amount for Web surfing (yeah, call me a junkie, as does
> my wife, along with some other choice names). At my request, I
> received a detail for the data charges, which indicates that each
> visited Web page equaled exactly 4KB of data. Most of my browsing
> was
> BBC-Mobile News, where the standard format is primarily text, with
> maybe a tiny graphic. I was not downloading music or video files.
>
>
> I used my US cellular phone -- a Samsung A707 Sync, with service
> provided by Cingular -- to download many of the same (or similar)
> pages as listed on Amigo's detail, and my phone indicated that these
> pages seemed to average around 1300-1500 bytes, less than half what
> MIRS/Amigo claimed.
How did your phone indicate this? Does it display the amount of
transfer, or simply the size of the page?
Those two things aren't the same- there's some overhead involved in the
transfer.
>
> Is it possible that the size of the same (or similar) Web page could
> vary so much between carriers and cell phone models?
Sure- my
PDA phone on T-Mobile has a status bar that counts transfer, and
the BBC news story pages I just checked were 4k each on my phone. Some
of the menus to select stories were 2k or 3k.
> If not, I think
> MIRS or Amigo may be engaging in some questionable billing practices.
At the 9-cents per kb that MIRS charges, I'd have laid off the web! On a
recent trip to Mexico, I actually deleted the
GPRS settings on the phone
to avoid paying 1.5 cents/kb.
> A few additional questions related to my billing dispute with MIRS/
> Amigo:
>
> 1. The phone I used in Israel, a Motorla i760, included the following
> specs:
>
> * Maximum WML Deck Size: 3K. Does that mean the phone's Web
> browser -- OpenWave V7.0.2 -- would not have been capable of
> downloading pages as large as 4KB? In WAP terminology, isn't Deck
> Size the same as Page Size in HTML terms?
>
> * Memory Cache Size: 60K. I was charged for multiple views of
> the same Web page, frequently within moments of each other, and I know
> that I didn't reload those pages. Since this phone has cache,
> wouldn't it have just re-displayed those pages stored in its memory
> without downloading new versions? All the pages I viewed were static
> and wouldn't have required updates from the server.
Depends on the phone's settings. I have the cache in my browser turned
off to avoid it displaying old info (if I leave it on, stuff like my
account balance and minutes used don't update.
> 2. I understand Mr. Navas's point about the effect of proxy servers,
> but could the size of downloaded pages really have been doubled or
> trebled from an observed 1500 bytes to a claimed 4KB, thanks to the
> carrier's network? I find that sort of inflation beyond belief.
Hard to say- maybe they send all data in 4kb packets, or they bill in 4kb
minimum increments.
> Other than fleecing consumers, where is the valued added by doing
> that?
I don't know- I'm unfamiliar with how
iDen services do data.
> Incidentally, many of the pages that I downloaded were from BBC-
> Mobile News, which states in its FAQ that its typical three-page new
> story totals about 5KB (assuming I did my math correctly), meaning
> that a single page should be about 1.7KB, about a third of what MIRS/
> Amigo claims.
Again, on my phone, with T-Mo, I was loading 4kb pages.
> PS. This dispute is not a minor issue to me, as MIRS/Amigo claims I
> downloaded over 600 Web pages and other "stuff" (files with suffixes
> CSS, WBMP, WML, GIF, and JPG), for a total of over 2700KB.
Those are all components of webpages- the graphics were jpgs, bmps and
gifs, for example.
> At its
> advertised download rate of US$.09 per KB, that comes to a not
> insignificant US$240, give or take a few bucks.
>
Ouch. That's an expensive lesson in data roaming.
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