[protocolture]

Years ago I got my first internet enabled mobile, and the carrier advertised it as having "300 free minutes" as part of the trial period, which is great. So I used 297 minutes of internet services in the first month, but aha actually the minutes only referred to telephony, and I was stung with a ~12,000 dollar overdue mobile internet invoice (360 dollars per megabyte or something equally ludicrous)

They got done in by a massive class action, that I was tangentially a beneficiary of, not because of the minutes claim, which was standard practice, but because they had failed to provide anyone with the cost of the data.

I think I paid them 300 bucks or something in the end. After further letting a 600 dollar agreement go to collections and settling with collections for 50%.

[ErroneousBosh]

Many many years ago my girlfriend at the time was on holiday with her mother so I'd added a "Roaming Bundle" to her phone.

While she was away I got a call from our phone provider that she'd racked up £1700 of roaming charges. "But don't worry about it!" said the customer service person, "Just stop your direct debit for this month just in case and we will call you when the bill is generated."

A couple of weeks later, they rang back, confirmed that the final amount was about two grand, and so I said "hang on, there was supposed to be a message when the bundle was halfway used and a message when the bundle was nearly used up - what happened to that?"

"Oh I don't know why you'd have been told that, we've never done that! But you're right, that's what they said, we've already listened to the call. What you *should* have been offered was this *other* bundle which would have cost £150, she's used about 75% of the data that would provide, plus the £25 you originally paid for the first bundle, call it 75 quid then? I'll just take the card number..."

And that, gentle reader, is why I'm still a customer.

[ErigmolCt]

This is why I'm pretty sympathetic to hard caps by default

[Terr_]

That makes me think of bank overdraft fees.

They are another kind of "soft" cap, pitched as an automatic convenience to the customer... But in practice they are too-often deceptive and harmful.

https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/are-banks-the-...

[QuantumGood]

Had a tiny (<400) overdraft covered just minutes later. Called bank, they said the payment causing the overdraft wouldn't post for 24 hours. Don't remember if that was policy, or something the person would do for us.

Several months later, I learned at that time, that they had instituted a standing stop payment order to the merchant we were paying, but only in the amount of exactly $600. Fast forward, we make a $600 payment, get a notification that it went through, no notification of stop payment, but later a notification from the merchant we were trying to pay (Synchrony - Amazon Store Card) stating they were closing our account due to the stop payment.

Meet in person with a bank rep. They have trouble finding the problem, but once found, argue that we must have requested this specifically, for they would never have done such a thing. I didn't even know a standing stop payment for a specific amount was a thing, asked what is normal policy, what bank terminonlogy would cause such a thing. Would not give any answer other than "you must have asked for it". What would I have said? "You must have asked for it" etc.

Currently fighting with the bank for audio of the phone call where they claim we requested this, and with Synchrony telling them it is the bank's fault. We immediately paid balance on closed Synchrony account, and had made ~12 payments successfully before the inadvertent stop payment.

[em-bee]

i always set my overdraft limit to zero. i never want to use that by accident.

[ipsento606]

In the US this always seems to be called "overdraft protection", as in "do you want overdraft protection on your account?"

I can never remember if overdraft protection means "we won't let your account overdraft", or "we will let your account overdraft"

It is an incredibly confusing name to me

I could look up the answer now, but I know I will just forget it again. I must have looked it up and then forgotten at least 10 separate times over the years

[SoftTalker]

Normally means that if your checking accout balance hits zero, they will pull from your savings account rather than returning a check presented for payment. They may (probably will) still charge you a fee when this happens, but it might be less than an overdraft.

Or, it might be a case where they grant you a short-term personal loan to cover the overdraft (up to some limit) rather than return checks. Again there will be fees and interest on this.

In either case, since they are not rejecting payments, you avoid getting hit with fees from whomever you wrote the check to. So your only fees/penalties are paid to the bank.

Of course the best answer is just keep better track of your checking account balance.

[fragmede]

Of course, the funny part about that is that they charge you to check your balance at the ATM. It's almost as if they don't want you to and have to pay their fee.

Which of course is about as odorous fee as possible. You don't have enough money, so we're going to charge you more money?

[BizarroLand]

Overdraft protection means that the bank will cover any overdrafts that you make, but then they will charge you a fee on top of it.

[Defletter]

It probably depends on the bank, but setting one's overdraft limit to zero doesn't necessarily help and may actually make things worse: some payments may still go through even if you don't have the funds, putting you in unauthorised overdraft, which tends to have a high daily fee.

[flexagoon]

That is insane. What's the point of overdraft limit if it doesn't limit your overdraft?

[bot403]

First time? You can choose between the $20 convenience fee or the $50 no-fee fee.

[tonnydourado]

When one of my sisters got her first paycheck from her first real job, she didn't knew much about banking, and thought that the overdraft limit on the ATM was her actual salary, so she just withdrew the whole thing. I think it took over a year, maybe two, to pay it all back.

[radu_floricica]

For consumer products, definitely. Any unreasonably large charge (with a comfortable margin, like 10x) should be waived by default, unless the client specifically requested the limit be removed.

[ElFitz]

I love hard caps, and am tired of cloud services not even offering those. May make sense for large companies. Makes no sense for hobbyists and small companies. But maybe that's the point?

[soco]

Data was counted as minutes back then for you? I only remember kB and MB costs...

[tialaramex]

Last century most people were only sometimes using the Internet. They'd "Go online", if you're young enough not to recognise that noise in Blue Prince when you use the network, that's a "Dial up modem" which is how a typical person would "Go online" in the mid-1990s. So in this regime counting minutes makes some sense.

I got a preview of the modern world from about 1996 because my first shared student house (shout out to any Hitchers reading) had a single dial-up modem set to always connect to a free-to-use University modem and then used IP Masquerading (the ancestor of today's NATs) so that all of our computers could share this tiny connection.

So by the time of my 21st birthday, I was "always on" in the same sense that you'd always be today, except with much, much lower bandwidth and what I can tell you is that this, not the bandwidth is what makes the difference.

When you're "always on" the reflexive answer to "Wait, where do Porcupines live?" is to look online. It's 1996 so Wikipedia doesn't exist yet. Google doesn't exist yet. But Tim's crap hypermedia system (the "World Wide Web") exists and so you just need to know where to look to find information about porcupines.

I didn't watch videos in 1996 because it'd take hours to receive a short low resolution video, even reading web comics was quite an undertaking, I remember downloading all of Bruno (at the time) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_(webcomic) over night so I could read it. But the fact you don't have to explicitly "go online" makes a huge qualitative difference even though the bandwidth is tiny.

[ErroneousBosh]

> if you're young enough not to recognise that noise in Blue Prince when you use the network, that's a "Dial up modem" which is how a typical person would "Go online" in the mid-1990s

I have some lovely high-quality video of dialup modems both dialling out and dialling into with good audio, which I'll post up at some point.

We still use them at work, at least until BT finally cut the copper services off at the end of the year.

[close04]

The similarity between mobile internet (CSD) and dial-up wasn't really obvious from the users' perspective because they weren't explicitly making a call to access the internet. The session was established transparently when data had to be transferred, and the time this took was charged as minutes.

Operators always dreamed of a world built on circuit-switched networks that they fully control instead of packet-switched IP networks where anyone can take part and operators are just a carrier. So the big operators started the mobile internet era with the telephony model.

[inigyou]

Circuit switching has latency and QoS advantages, but it's definitely not worth the cost for most use cases.

Interestingly, TDM carriers have a latency of approximately one bit per hop and jitter less than that, while any kind of packetized voice such as VoIP has a latency of at least one packet worth of audio, plus one to several packet transmission times per hop, and jitter of several packet transmission times, and packet drop on top of all that. We've actually made quality worse in the name of fitting more services down the same wire, which isn't necessarily bad but it's something to think about.

[soco]

Things I learned today: the very first mobile (cellular) data protocol was indeed dial-up over the GSM voice line: namely the CSD. What I had in mind - GPRS - came only later... so yes, even on mobile it was initially billed by minute. Wow.

[benj111]

Same here and I started uni in 2003. At home it was dial up and you had to unspool the wire across the house from the phone plug to the computer.

At uni it was fast. So you could actually load images by default.

[kalleboo]

In the early 2G GSM days, you would connect via "CSD" (Circuit-Switched Data[0]) which essentially emulated a dial-up connection (except it was digital the whole way) and that was billed per minute. Using HSCSD you could bundle multiple CSD channels for higher bandwidth but the minute charges were per channel so the cost added up.

By the time phones got built-in WAP browsers, GPRS had arrived which was billed per byte, but CSD was still supported (I remember using it once or twice in a certain building at uni where GPRS never worked for some reason)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_Switched_Data

[dspillett]

Very early on, mobile data was essentially an emulation of an analogue modem call, at blazing fast rates like 19200baud or less, held over the same channels as voice calls with a bit of extra jiggery-pokery, and were charged by the minutes just like voice calls. Sometimes they were charged as normal voice calls, sometimes you ended up being charged extra (or not being charged extra as such, but with data calls not being counted in any pre-paid minute allowance your plan had). It was vitally important to check this before making modem calls, as some providers charged data calls in the same band as premium rate voice calls, meaning that just picking up a few text emails could be quite expensive.

[cue misty eyed memories of trying to get my Psion 5mx to connect to the Internet by infra-red serial link to my phone, to try get updated connection information for my next train as the one I was on was going to be too late to make the planned connection…]

[mathgeek]

Internet access used to be billed by the minute back in the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL days, and early phone plans mirrored that for ease of marketing.

[ffsm8]

Other way around. The phone plans were billed by the minute. Then came the Internet. In is first generation, Internet was essentially just a long distance call through a modem. Hence it was billed - like the call - by the minute.

Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines.

While the phone still had a dedicated line it didn't actually need a power connection, as the power through the phone wire was sufficient.

[giantrobot]

Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges. It wasn't until the late 90s the major online services went to flat rate "unlimited" plans.

[thaumasiotes]

> Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges.

AOL was offering free minutes because it was an ISP, not because it was an online service. (It was also an online service. Most of that service was indeed free; some of it billed by the minute, but that was separate from the rate you paid for connecting to the internet.)

[mathgeek]

I'm thoroughly confused as to how what you're saying differs from my previous post, but I believe you just misunderstand that by "early phone plans" in my post's and the parent post's context, I meant phone plans for Internet access ("early" being the feature phone era).

[thaumasiotes]

> Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines.

The telephone network made the utterly bizarre choice to intentionally degrade the audio signal of a call, guaranteeing that people would have an unnatural, distorted voice if you spoke to them over the phone. There was no way for voip not to be better quality.

[gwbas1c]

If you were used to dial-up internet, (IE, where your computer was plugged into a phone line and made a phone call to your internet service provider,) that's a reasonable assumption to make. Some early services billed by the minute, too.

[protocolture]

No it wasn't. But my previous connection was dial up, and there were no costs provided for the data at all in the documentation I received.

[numpad0]

It was one thing to use the line to call an ISP, which can be a company of its own, and another to use their Internet access on that call.

[protocolture]

I once had a payment fail and the ISP cancelled my internet, my voip, my mobile and my wifes mobile too.

Ok how do you expect me to arrange payment then lmao.

[numpad0]

... through snail mails?