I'm the OP. I heard similar stories - a friend got an AT&T bill for $1200 after getting off a plane in Europe (from US) and turning it on for 1 minute.
I'd bet my reputation that AT&T is bundling data packets across the border - and that this could be the basis of a big class action suit.
In my case, I was driving northward from Oak Harbor to Vancouver. Roaming was off on my AT&T phone - so there should have been no intl data billed until I turned it on for that one minute.
A roaming clearing house is an organisation that manages the billing between carriers in roaming agreements. These clearing houses exchange data in a common format (bytes per session) between telcos. It's almost certain that AT&T use one for their roaming agreements.
If pressed, AT&T would need to correlate three pieces of information - the clearing house data, their billing, and the canadian network provider's logs. Each entity is legally separate here - if all three logs line up, it's going to be hugely compelling evidence.
It's very unlikely that AT&T is gathering up your data charges and billing you as you go over the border - it would be supreme incompetence at a carrier of this scale. More likely, something's gone wrong at the clearing house, and you should press them for aligned, detailed records. (I audited telco billing systems for a few years.)
I think what he's suggesting isn't that the logs don't line up, but that AT&T may be purposely switching the phone to use the data roaming opportunity. Even though carriers gouge each other horribly on roaming, the marginal profit may be even more to the consumer. If this is true, it would be a scandal.
If only it were as simple as you make it sound ... in practice, Corporations repeatedly use commerce and contracts clause rights to sue communities and states to overturn environmental regulations. They use free speech rights to flood elections with money and affect the outcome. They use the rights from unreasonable search and seizure to prevent the release of acts of public harm in lawsuits under the guise of protecting intellectual property. The impacts of corporate constitutional rights have overturned our democracy.
Fair point. I like hitting the do not disturb button along with my phone's do not disturb ... it has a mental effect on the mind ... and allows me to focus more clearly on other things. The scheduled quiet hours are also cool.
I wrote this to show how you can integrate the Mailgun cloud-based email service in your PHP-based application. I also used the Yii Framework for Geogram ... so it's a great example of the strengths of both Yii & Geogram.
