The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
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The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#2I had the Telstra 60GB plan up until they upgraded them about a month ago, because of the excess usage charge you would have to try and stop a safe distance from your cap, never getting the full 60GB, it would also lag behind on updating, although not as much, up to about 12 hours I think.
They also have a tendency to list some of your usage on the next day when it was used before midnight. Really annoying when your using your plan up on the last day, then some of that gets transferred to the next month.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#3Wow, that is usurious.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#4This whole model of "go over and we'll make you sorry, sunshine" is terrible for innovation. It encourages tentative, cautious use of services that could be more valuable if they were used without fear of financial punishment.
If you must ration throughput, a much better model is one that drops its bandwidth after hitting a cap. Though nothing compares to actually upgrading your network so you don't have to grudgingly provision resources like some kind of Dickens villain.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#5This reminds of me how Three Mobile in Australia drops back to Telstra when roaming. This is by default and the user is none the wiser (unless they had the knowledge to turn off roaming).
I think every person I know who has a Three phone used an amount of data in their first month whilst roaming and had a $100+ excess usage charge (often much higher).
I'm sure it's all spelled out to them upon purchasing, but it's not clear and your average user has no idea what roaming is.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#6This reminds of me how Three Mobile in Australia drops back to Telstra when roaming. This is by default and the user is none the wiser (unless they had the knowledge to turn off roaming). I think every person I know who has a Three phone used an amount of data in their first month whilst roaming and had a $100+ excess usage charge (often much higher). I'm sure it's all spelled out to them upon purchasing, but it's no…
My old 3 phone used to constantly roam in 3's own broadband area. Ka-ching! Of the VHA brands Vodafone is the better of the two.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#7The price and quality of communications in Australia is absolutely ridiculous. I mostly blame the monopoly/biopoly (Telstra and somewhat Optus) but the competitors aren't much better either.
It's also just going to get worse with the new "cleanfeed".
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#8Imagine if this was combined with the iPhone worm from a few months back. It'd essenially pingflood all phones exposed on the telco networks and screw thousands of people in excess changes without them even knowing something was going on.
This worries me greatly. (puts iPhone on WiFi mode)
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#9Imagine if this was combined with the iPhone worm from a few months back. It'd essenially pingflood all phones exposed on the telco networks and screw thousands of people in excess changes without them even knowing something was going on. This worries me greatly. (puts iPhone on WiFi mode)
I didn't put this in the blog post, but hypothetically speaking you would not even need a worm.
A person would need an ISP account where you don't get limited on uploads (like Internode, or most non-Australian ISPs, for instance.)
A person would need to spoof the ping return address, so the ping never comes back to them. Or spoof a UDP stream where the ICMP port unreachable never comes back (or don't spoof it, and put up with 32 bytes of download for every 64k sent.)
Then, the person just starts sending and people start accruing costs.
I'm not advocating that someone should do this. I'm just worried that they might choose to.
Re: The risks of "$15 for $2097 worth of mobile internet"
#10Imagine if this was combined with the iPhone worm from a few months back. It'd essenially pingflood all phones exposed on the telco networks and screw thousands of people in excess changes without them even knowing something was going on. This worries me greatly. (puts iPhone on WiFi mode)
I didn't put this in the blog post, but hypothetically speaking you would not even need a worm. A person would need an ISP account where you don't get limited on uploads (like Internode, or most non-Australian ISPs, for instance.) A person would need to spoof the ping return address, so the ping never comes back to them. Or spoof a UDP stream where the ICMP port unreachable never comes back (or don't spoof it, and pu…
This just strikes me as so very open to malicious attack. That I can scan networks to find smart phones on Virgin (or other networks), and do no more than a ping flood those IPs to incur thousands of dollars in excess charges to a unwitting person.
It takes the term Denial Of Service attack to an entirely new level of bad.