Metered Round Up

Time flies - it has been almost 5 years since I moved over to Truphone. It has it little quirks, but overall has been stellar in what it offers: a morphing, multi-instance SIM card with multiple numbers and global plans. Being abroad is like being at home. Almost no strings attached. I almost forgot what roaming was.

So last week, when driving up the Pacific Highway 1 from Los Angeles, I was surprised to receive a data usage warning. It said I had only 200MB left of my 2GB bundle.

After requesting a detailed log and analyzing it, I found a peak during which the phone was able to set up and tear down almost 200 data transfer sessions within a 10-minute time window. Each session was billed as 5MB transfer. That totaled to 1GB.

1GB mobile data in 10 minutes.

I don't have any detailed application activity logger installed on the phone, so can't really tell what happened. Checked with Truphone and they told me they were rounding up data sessions to 1MB. Which is A LOT! But it still seems the rounding was even higher, up to 5MB.

What that means is, if you open a session, transmit any little amount of data, even 1 byte, the amount is rounded up. So it shows as 1MB (or 5MB) figure on the bill. As a car is moving along a highway, it may be tearing up and opening new sessions very frequently. The log clearly shows it was doing that up to every 3 seconds.

The phone might have been doing very little - like pinging a DNS. And each little ping was billed as a 5MB transmission. That quickly escalated to more than 1GB in total. I still have no clue why it did that (as I had never experienced that before) and why it started and why it (fortunately) stopped.

I was still very lucky it all happened within my plan and in a country that offers reasonable data rates. Was it in Cuba, at $35 per MB, my byll would skyrocket to $35,000.00 in 10 minutes. In other words, the transfer speed would be about $60 per second.

Metered connections just do not make any sense anymore, especially at LTE speeds and when block rounding up is in place. But as this still is how mobile carriers make money, the scheme will stay around for years to come. And after 5G deployments the $100 per second barrier will be easily broken.