I don't like to promote T-Mobile too much, because they have a lot of flaws, but they're great compared to the other US providers.

I'm on a prepaid SIM chip with them at the moment, using my own phone. I just bought a $100/1,000 minute refill that only cost me $70, thanks to Bing cash back, so that's $.07 a minute. Those minutes don't expire for a year.

Whenever I want, I can switch, through their Web interface, to the "Sidekick" plan, which gives me unlimited data for $1/day and flat-rate $.15/minute calls. (Only problem is, they blocked port 80 for non-Sidekick devices, but I can still check my mail, and I'm working on proxies...)

More interestingly, my understanding is that they will unlock your T-Mobile phone for you in store, while you are still under contract, if you tell them that you are going abroad and want to use other SIM chips while out of the country.

My old no-contract monthly plan (with T-Mobile) was $60/month for unlimited Internet and 300 minutes. This has to be competitive with the other majors.

Thoughts?

I'm using a prepaid T-Mobile SIM in an unlocked iPhone 2G and it works really well, except for the data. EDGE data is all gatewayed and blocked with some ancient WAP server (epc.tmobile.com), but I can still see some certain sites that they've enabled for their other phones (like CNN.mobi and ESPN.mobi).

I don't think I can switch mine to the Sidekick plan like you're using. Where did you get your SIM?

T-Mobile corporate owned store. Salesperson questioned whether it would work, since I didn't have a Sidekick unique identifier on my phone. Works fine. Unfortunately, port 80 and a few others were blocked back in July, when T-Mobile stopped actively letting unlocked iPhone users buy the Sidekick plan.

If you can't switch to the Sidekick plan through t-mobile.com (under Manage->Plans), I would suggest going to a corporate-owned store and asking, or calling up Customer Care. There are a number of discussion threads on this subject if you Google around, especially involving iPhones. The HowardForums wiki also has some good information, although sometimes out-of-date, incomplete, and ungrammatical.

Be warned, though, I was apparently paying $1/day regardless of whether I used any data or not. All the same, this is the only GSM/unlocked prepaid data plan in America that I'm aware of, and it's still the cheapest. Just have to figure out how to circumvent the blocks.

I've discovered I can switch to the Sidekick plan (cost me a buck to verify that!), but it seems there's no known APN setup that actually works on the iPhone anymore. Most of the forums trying this gave up over the summer, it seems.

Gosh! I didn't realize I was being charged each and every time I pressed that stupid button accidentally. I don't even remember how many times I would have done that!

Being European, I'm amazed that the US carriers have been able to keep their stranglehold over the phones for so long. Over here, the carriers have no say over which phone I put on their network, and which features that phones has. They can't cripple the phones, limit the phones, or force some sort of default configuration that gives them money if I accidentally push a button.

I have no idea how you could break that stranglehold though, and I've never really seen any good debate on it, only outrage and acceptance of defeat?

I hit that web button quite often (I have a verizon phone). I just hit "End" and I've never been charged for data. Of course, I don't have a data plan in the first place, so that's one way to avoid it.

The charge only hits people without the data plan. (Even if you have their crappy data plan, you'll have enough monthly allowance to eat a few kb of mistakes without seeing specific charges for it)

The reason people consider it 'scammy' is precisely because there's no way for normal people to avoid the charge(1). They can't remap the key. They can't just not get a data plan. They can't even block data service (technically they can, but they still get charged if they hit the button and it sends back the block message). etc.

Sure, if you hit End fast enough you don't get billed. But does that make it unreasonable to say "I should be able to turn this off altogether"?

(1) I suspect you can deliberately 'break' the data connection settings in the admin menu. This should prevent you from ever completing a data connection and thereby avoiding charges. Though I don't know if that's still possible on current versions of Verizon's crappy phone OS.

On Verizon's website, you can change your account settings to block data entirely. I've done that for my girlfriend's phone, she doesn't need it, doesn't want it, and just blocking it was the easiest way to prevent accidents like that.

It's pointed out explicitly in the article that such action does not work.

Feel free to try the following: Have her hit the button. Don't hit End; let the phone do its thing and reply that you don't have data access. Consult your monthly bill.

I've done that accidently, several times, while using her phone. The phone never loads the home page, just sits at the blue "loading" screen.

Me neither! And I'm a pretty technically savvy person. What a disgrace. Where in the universe is it written that certain industries (mobile phones, used cars, health insurance) will be overrun by sleazebags?..

In the FTC/FCC legislations/deregulations; Europe doesn't have these problems.

I have never ever had this happen to me in 5+ years on Verizon and sometimes I hit the web button accidentally. What could be different about my account?

It has to do with the speed at which you cancel. You're likely a young, tech-savvy person who cancels the web launch within one second of launching.

For the average non-techie person, it takes longer than one second to notice that something unusual is happening, and more than one second to make a decision on how to cancel it. The fastest they could possibly cancel it is 3-5 seconds, and in their view, they canceled it "instantly" - that is, they reacted as quickly as they were capable.

The difference between a 1- and 5-second response is probably the difference between no charge and $1.99.

It's sad/fascinating that a group of accounting/business/tech/etc. people all got together to design such an ingenious revenue generating system: The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data.

NOT COOL. I’ve had phones for years, and I sometimes do that mistake to this day, as I’m sure you have. Legal, yes; ethical, NO.

"Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!

It would be hard to prove carriers are conspiring to inflate date charges incurred by user error. The placement of the services could just as easily be a ploy to legitimately lure customers in. The early termination issue though is a bit more complicated. If the carrier is going to subsidize the phone hardware through a contract they obviously need to have a termination fee. The exact amount of the termination fee is the tricky part. It would be nice if it had some basis in reality such as the true subsidized cost of the phone hardware varying by handset model.

> It would be hard to prove carriers are conspiring to inflate date charges incurred by user error. The placement of the services could just as easily be a ploy to legitimately lure customers in.

I find it more likely that the expensive services are placed up-front to draw in users. They just happen to serve a secondary role by pulling in revenue through accidental usage.

Now, the carriers have to realize that they have all of this extra revenue coming in from accidental usage. They probably all actively choose to ignore it. "Why should we spend the time and effort to change something that will make us less money?" That is the unethical part. If they know that they are profiting off of their customers in such a way, but decide to turn a blind eye to it because the money is 'rolling in,' then they've definitely crossed the line.

Google has proven that a company can succeed by innovating and being nice to customers... why don't more be like them!? Well hopefully Google drives them out of business.

They don't do this because customers have proven that they will flock to subsidized phones with unfavorable contracts. Verizon needs to protect itself from people who might sign up for a nice phone, then try to drop the contract, netting them a new phone for up to 100% off.

Verizon is not doubling the fee to protect itself from broken contracts. If that were the case, they would simply demand that the subsidized portion gets paid back. They are trying to lock customers in and penalize people for switching.

This will be a short-term win. In the long term, it may reduce new signups. If you have a huge subscriber base and limited competition you can afford to milk them for all they are worth.

It's still a crappy thing to do.

The $1.99 charge is flat out unethical. I used my cable box to rent a movie once, but it didn't download properly and getting my $2.99 or whatever credited back into my account was such a pain that I never did it again. It made me question my whole relationship with them. If my carrier charges me $1.99 for a mistaken button press that I cannot disable, I would do everything in my power to drop them.

I'm talking about unpopular business practices, like purposely making it so easy to be charged $1.99.

It seems like whenever consumers have an ostensible choice in something, but do not pay the full price for the thing they're buying, they end up not acting in their best interest because the costs are distorted. Whether it's health insurance, airplane tickets, or cell phones.

In this case, for instance, Apple can say an iPhone costs $600, because, to a consumer, it costs $200. The amount that Apple gets for the device could just have easily been $500 or $800 because, well, that's not what you're paying when you buy one.