THE VERIZON DATA TRAP
Synopsis
Until a short while ago, if you bought a smart phone from Verizon (and most other providers), you were required to purchase an unlimited data package at a cost of $29.99 a month. Recently, Verizon offered an alternative plan that provides 150 mbs for a price of $15 a month, which, after taking into account taxes and similar add-ons, could come to $500 over the life of the typical two year contract. If you already have the unlimited plan, should you try to save $500 and switch? If you are buying for the first time, which plan should you purchase? How can you tell how much data you need?
Answer: Not even Hawking, Einstein and Sherlock Holmes all working together would be able to figure out how much data you will use, or why. As a general rule, if you have a Blackberry, the cheaper plan may work for you. If you have a Droid, forget about it.
The reason for this is buried in a welter of mysterious data usage charges, obtuse bills, misleading itemizations, and Verizon’s outright refusal to explain those charges.
Last month, Verizon settled with the Federal Communications Commission a complaint for deceptive charges for unexplained data usage for customers on a pay-as-you-go plan. A similar problem seems to arise if you sign up for a FIOS land line for the first time. You will be promised a certain monthly rate for the first 12 or 24 months. However, the very first bill, and the second and third, often will be twice or even three times larger than what you thought you agreed to. Many people don’t even realize this or don’t have the time or energy to contest it, and just pay the excessive amount. To get it corrected, you will have to spend many hours on the phone with the company. Otherwise, you wind up spending many times more than you should
I leave it you whether this is (a) incompetent billing procedures, (b) intentional business practice, (c) something Verizon does not do deliberately, but is grossly indifferent to and knowingly drags its corporate feet about correcting it because it brings in additional revenues, rightly or wrongly, (d) sharp business practices or (e) all of the above.
Moral: if you are a Verizon customer or plan to become one, beware that Verizon’s business model seems to take advantage of uninformed customers and obfuscates customers’ efforts to learn what is going on.
Discussion
If you have cell phone service from Verizon, you may have learned that you might be able to save $15 a month in data charges by switching from a plan that permits unlimited usage to a plan that provides only 150 mb per billing period. After adding in taxes and similar charges, that could save you around $500 a year.
Under this alternative, if you do occasionally exceed the 150 mb limit, the charge is $15 for another 150 mbs. As a result, even if you exceed the 150 mb limit in some months, you will not lose money by opting for the cheaper plan as long as the total does not exceed 300 mb. Even if you use more than 300 mb occasionally, you might still save money if you stay under the 150 mb limit for some months.
By themselves, e-mails do not generate significant data usage. However, if you transmit or receive large files with the e-mail, such as a photograph, the data meter will spin like crazy. (At least, this is something that the user can understand, even if he or she can’t quite figure out exactly how much data is being transmitted.)
If you do not use your phone for transmitting large files, spend a lot of time browsing the internet from the phone, downstream a lot of music or videos, or otherwise use apps that burn up the data meter, it would seem that it would be a no-brainer to switch to the cheaper plan.
But before you call Verizon and tell them to switch you to the cheaper plan, you need to review your bills to see how much data usage you have been generating. Go to Verizonwireless.com and sign into your cell phone account. On this opening page, you can see what your data usage for the current month is running. To see what it was in prior full months, select “view bill”. There is a drop-down box that permits you to select any of the prior 12 months. For each month, click on “data” to see the total usage. (For some earlier months, you will get a pop-up window. If you do, select the “KB/MB” tab at the top.)
If your average over the past year has been over 300 mb, and you expect your use of the phone to continue at the same level or increase in the future, switching will cost you money. Otherwise, you should be able to save money by switching.
One would expect that if you are slightly over the 150 mb level, you might be able to disable or uninstall those apps that are generating data and which you don’t need. So the next step is to try to identify which apps generate how much data. Turn them off and go for the cheaper plan.
Now things get sticky, because there is no way to know which programs or applications on your phone generate data usage charges, and you can’t be sure that future months are going to be the same. Usage can vary by a factor of 10 or more from month to month, so even if you are usually under the 150 mb (or 300 mb) level, you may find that you frequently will exceed that limit in future months on a regular basis. There is no way to predict what is going to happen. Moreover, even if you could figure out which ones are the villains, you may not be able to disable them.
It would seem a simple matter to figure out which apps or programs on your Droid or Blackberry are incurring data usage charges, but there is no way to find out which one(s) they are. Verizon won’t (or can’t) tell you. If you have a Droid, you are probably exceeding the 150 mb limit even you never use the phone for any purpose whatever. As long as the phone is on, data usage is being run up. In my case, most of the usage occurred while I was asleep for the night. To stop this usage, it seems that you have to remove the battery. One suggestion I have seen is to kill all the automatic sync functions (e.g., calendar, contacts and perhaps, e-mail), but there are at least two problems with that suggestions: (1) first, that tends to destroy the reason why you bought a smart phone to begin with, and (2) it doesn’t work. I still ran up some pretty substantial data usage will all automatic sync functions turned off!
The same problem does not seem to exist for the Blackberry phone.
For example, I have had a Blackberry for over a year. My wife acquired a Droid last April. Neither of us uses text messaging (we have blocks on text messages on both of our phones). Neither of us transmits photos or other large files to or from our cell phones, or spend much time on the Internet using the phones (the screens are just too small to use the phones for that purpose). We don’t downstream music or videos. We may be the only two people left in the world who still do not use Twitter, or Face Book, or any of the other social web sites. We do receive e-mail on the phones and occasionally I will send an e-mail from the phone (probably less than 5 times a month), but e-mails are not supposed to use a significant number of data units. We never download files attached to an e-mail because trying to read them on the small screens is impossible.
On my Blackberry, for the past 8 months, I averaged less than 10 mb per month, and the largest amount for any one month was 16 mb this past September. I switched to the 150 mb plan, reduced my phone charges by $15 a month, and anticipate no problems.
The story is amazingly different for the Droid. In four of the six months since my wife purchased the phone, her data usage exceeded 150. This past September, it was only 37.5 mb.
I had assumed that the large usage for the first two months was generated by some start-up functions, including downloading some apps and perhaps syncing them for the first time. Since my wife used only 37.5 mb in the most recent month, I mistakenly assumed that those large usages were related to those kinds of start-up functions, and would not recur. However, when I checked my account, I discovered that, for the first 12 days of the current billing cycle, it is already over 400 mb. Fortunately, I was able to switch that phone back to unlimited usage retroactively to the beginning of the current monthly billing cycle.
The interesting and highly vexing problem is why we cannot tell which programs are running up data usage. If these are programs we don’t use, we should be able to uninstall or otherwise disable them. But there is no way to figure out which ones are involved. Verizon supplies some information about this on the web site, but it not very helpful and, in fact, is grossly misleading. Moreover, it seems that some of the programs cannot be uninstalled without disabling the phone.
You can get to and download the on-line data to a spreadsheet that supposedly shows all the details about your past usage, but that table is grossly misleading. See the example in Appendix A, below, which is an extract showing a portion of my own bill for just two days for the Droid. Typically, there are actually over 700 entries for every month; the extract shows just 15 of those entries for the August bill.
As you will see, the chart does not show which programs, file or functions were generating the data usage.
Moreover, if you add up all the kbs on all 700 or more lines on this chart, the total is only a small fraction of the total usage you are being charged for (or would be charged for if you abandon the unlimited usage plan). For this particular month, the total that I obtained from downloading the details into a spreadsheet and adding them up was only about one fourth of the amount shown on the bill itself. The reason, as I eventually figured out (Verizon doesn’t tell you this), is that there are several lines in that chart that show a date and time, but with no amount entered in the kb column. When I first saw those lines, I assumed they were blank because no usage occurred or that the usage did not count for billing purposes but, in fact, about 75% of the total charges should have appeared on those blank lines. It is like the “dark matter” in the universe, which constitutes 75% of the total mass but is entirely invisible to ordinary humans.
So for the large majority of the charges, you cannot even see how many kilobytes were used.
Don’t bother calling Verizon for explanations, because none of its representatives can figure that out, either, and they all insist that no one else at Verizon could do that, either. I don’t really believe that they can’t do this, but they just won’t.
We have tried all sorts of methods to eliminate or reduce the data usage on the Droid, but nothing seems to work. At least half of the charges are run up at night while we are asleep. We could remove the battery at night, but I suspect that that only delays the data traffic until the battery is restored, and doesn’t reduce the total amount over any 24 hour period.
The Verizon technical support team suggested that we download and use the “Advanced Task Killer” program. This is supposed to help turn off many processes that you are not even aware are running and which are probably burning up the data usage meter. Unfortunately, it does not run in the background automatically. You have to remember to invoke that app manually. Many apps will merely restart on their own, so you have to repeat the process every 30 minutes or so, even at night when you hope to be sleeping for a good six to eight hours without interruption. In any event, I tried using this program, and it has no discernable effect on the data usage.
Moreover, some techie types strongly recommend never using Advanced Task Killer—they claim that your phone will perform better without it and suggest that you delete that app altogether (see, e.g., http://www.makeuseof.com/answers/android-nexus-consume-50-mb-internet-data-transfer-day/.) One site suggests downloading and using a program called Spare Parts (http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.androidapps.spare_parts ) , a free app which claims to be able to measure and control data usage on the Droid, but as far as I can tell, it only tells you how many milliseconds each app has been running, not how many kbs of data it has transmitted or received.
One telephone rep thought that the usage on the Droid was incurred by constant updating and data transfers between the cell phone and Google, but wasn’t sure. Since maintaining a Google account is required for the Droid to function, you cannot turn these operations off.
As part of my effort to figure out what was going on, I brought the Droid to the technical support desk at a local Verizon wireless store, to see if they could determine what was causing the high data usage. Several Verizon employees tried, but were unable to figure it out. I asked the supervisor at the store to look at the phone. He claimed that, to get the answer, he had to disable the text block we had on the phone, and I agreed to let him do that. However, this did not help him. After a short while, I discovered that he did not even know the difference between a mg and a kb (he had to ask one of his employees to explain it.) After I left the store, I realized that the supervisor had failed to restore the text block, and I had to return to get it fixed. So don’t expect very much help from the people Verizon employs as supervisors.
In the past few days, Verizon has added a screen which claims that it can calculate how much data you need, based on the number of e-mails, minutes spent down-streaming music or videos, number of photographs transmitted, etc., but the numbers are absolutely misleading. They may be correct for the Blackberry, but wholly fallacious for the Droid.
The bottom line is that Verizon will charge you for usage even though it can’t or won’t explain exactly what usage is involved and there is no realistic way to keep those usages below 150 mb a month.
Last month, Verizon settled with the Federal Communications Commission a similar complaint for deceptive charges for data usage. It had been charging “pay-as-you-go” customers $1.99 a month for items that they had not ordered and did not want. Often, Verizon had preloaded programs that automatically contacted Verizon’s data service in an “acknowledgment” session, without the knowledge and, obviously, without the consent of the customers. Verizon agreed to pay $52.8 million in refunds to those customers.
It appears that Verizon’s business model includes many different and clever ways to sock it to its customers with mysterious charges and deceptive explanations.
Note that Verizon is not alone. Consumer Reports usually finds that Verizon has the best customer relations in the industry, so we can guess how bad the others must be. There is a pending case before the US Supreme Court involving a claim of fraud against AT&T for charging customer $30 for phones it advertised were “free”. The AT&T service agreement required all disputes to be resolved by arbitration, but the California courts held that that provision was “unconscionable” and, therefore, unenforceable.
Appendix A
Extract from detailed list of data usage for the month of August
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ADDENDUM: I recently discovered this chart on the Verizonwireless.com page purporting to show how much data usage is generated by various functions.
Email (text only) = 10 KB
Typical Web Page Lookup¹ = 400 KB
Online gaming = 5 MB/hr
Audio Streaming = 60 MB/hr
Video Streaming = 260 MB/hr
Typical Web Page Lookup¹ = 400 KB
Online gaming = 5 MB/hr
Audio Streaming = 60 MB/hr
Video Streaming = 260 MB/hr
For example, one half an hour of video streaming would consume virtually all of the 150 allowance. Looking up 12 web pages a day would similarly consume the entire allowance. On the other hand, you could send and receive 15,000 plain text e-mails a month before you hit the limit. Simple? Or even more misleading? Given how my wife and I use the Droid, we shouldn’t even be using 1 mb , let alone over 400 this month. What is wrong with Verizon’s presentation?
The answer seems to be that this chart does not list all the functions with generate data usage, and the ones that are omitted are the gas guzzlers. They are the ones that run in the background without your knowledge, including all of the syncing operations. Those are the operations that are going to torpedo your budget when the bills start coming in at the end of the month.. So the more Verizon tries to explain, the more misleading and disingenuous the information is!
Addendum: The Wall Street Journal ran a long article on Saturday, December 18, 2010, which may explain why there is so much data usuage that can't be controlled by the phone owner.
It appears that many of the apps are constantly transmitting private information to various advertising services about the phone owner, including the phone number, current location and ZIP code, the phone's ID number, the owner's gender and age, and, sometimes, even the owner's name. This would explain the frequency and volume of data being transmitted by my wife's Android. And there is no way to shut this down or opt out! So we are forced to purchase the more expensive data plan from Verizon just so our privacy can be violated by these apps.
Some of the offending apps: Paper Toss; Pumpkin Maker, Pandora, TextPlus 4, Grindr, Angry Birds (some of these may not be Android apps), MySpace, DailyHoroscope, . . .
Addendum #2 (Dec. 28, 2010). I had filed a complaint with the FCC. Today, I got a call from someone claiming that he was calling on behalf of the CEO of Verizon Wireless. I could not talk to him for more than a minute or two--I was in a car on my way to an appointment that I couldn't miss. He said he would e-mail me his contact information and requested that I call him back to continue the conversation, but I never got that e-mail. (My caller ID said his number was 910 794 6200.) In the minute or two we spoke, he denied all of the allegations in my FCC complaint, but he may have been only a PR rep, who would not really know what was going on and was only trying to persuade me into withdrawing the FCC complaint. We shall see.
Addendum: The Wall Street Journal ran a long article on Saturday, December 18, 2010, which may explain why there is so much data usuage that can't be controlled by the phone owner.
It appears that many of the apps are constantly transmitting private information to various advertising services about the phone owner, including the phone number, current location and ZIP code, the phone's ID number, the owner's gender and age, and, sometimes, even the owner's name. This would explain the frequency and volume of data being transmitted by my wife's Android. And there is no way to shut this down or opt out! So we are forced to purchase the more expensive data plan from Verizon just so our privacy can be violated by these apps.
Some of the offending apps: Paper Toss; Pumpkin Maker, Pandora, TextPlus 4, Grindr, Angry Birds (some of these may not be Android apps), MySpace, DailyHoroscope, . . .
Addendum #2 (Dec. 28, 2010). I had filed a complaint with the FCC. Today, I got a call from someone claiming that he was calling on behalf of the CEO of Verizon Wireless. I could not talk to him for more than a minute or two--I was in a car on my way to an appointment that I couldn't miss. He said he would e-mail me his contact information and requested that I call him back to continue the conversation, but I never got that e-mail. (My caller ID said his number was 910 794 6200.) In the minute or two we spoke, he denied all of the allegations in my FCC complaint, but he may have been only a PR rep, who would not really know what was going on and was only trying to persuade me into withdrawing the FCC complaint. We shall see.
