Nowadays, we’re the victims of convergence, as most handsets come packed with high end features and allow their owners to use push email, watch YouTube clips and use the incorporated GPS navigator. These could result in a pretty intense data traffic to and from your mobile, which generates a pretty impressive bill from your carrier.
For example, Ms. Lee Bee Wah, 40 has received at some point a $1,700 phone bill, after travelling in Phuket, Thailand for 4 days. Turns out that her Internet enabled handset downloaded emails the whole time, even if the woman didn’t open any of them. Ms. Lee Bee Wah didn’t know that she had to deactivate the pushmail service, before getting charged for e-mail downloads.
Such a service pushes e-mail from a server to your phone, just like the SMS messages, but they require the handset to connect to mobile broadband networks, a costly initiative when abroad. So, remember to double check and deactivate any services that eat up megabytes, while travelling to another country, if you don’t want to wake up with a huge bill the next month.
[via straitstimes]
