Verizon Mobile Broadband wtf

[reckedracing]

So my old lady got a little dell laptop from her family for xmas.
We don't have cable internet at the apartment so she decided to get the verizon movile broadband so she could use her laptop.

So we go to the verizon store on sunday. She gets the thing all is well. We get home sunday night and I help her connect it all and it works well, she browses a couple websites, nothing major. Maybe 5 different pages.

Monday night, she gets home and plugs the USB in and goes to connect and she checks her usage. $40 a month gets her 250mb. The usage history shows a time stamp. 7:07 pm is .26 mb. 7:11pm it jumps to 101mb.

So today she calls them on the phone, they can't explain it to her. She ends up going in to the store today and returning the usb device within the 3 days to get her money back. Can anyone explain her usage could have showed over 100mb without being used?

Verizon is refusing the back down on the charges. They say they can't do anything until the bill is issued, then she can dispute them.

 

[phyregod]

Fail. This isn't the stone age, you shouldn't ever purchase internet that is sold by the mb.

 

[reckedracing]

their options are 250mb for $40
and 5Gb for $60

not getting cable at the apt cause we are moving in 2 months

they do not have unlimited
any other thoughts?

 

[dacheat]

this is good to know. i was going to buy their mifi service in feb...now i'll wait to see your outcome.

 

[TurboMirage]

dont bother with verizon. get the sprint mobiles. its $50 for UNLIMITED. i love mine.

 

[reckedracing]

swing and a miss
from sprint coverage website
Data roaming - limited access to some services.
at&t and Verizon are the players in my area

 

[corvetteguy78]

It's unreal that VZ doesn't offer an unlimited plan. I looked into this 2-3 months ago and was disgusted with $60/m for 5GB of usage...this is really only good for the person who doesn't do much but look up stuff on google or email midly

 

[Battle Pope]

You might be able to tether to a cellphone for 3g, if your phone has a data plan. Not sure how that would work, depends on your contract/hardware.

As far as the bandwidth usage -- maybe a windows update?

 

[94civicturbo]

we have a mifi at my house and i am on it all the time and we never go over im not sure which plan we have though

 

[reckedracing]

i know there were windows updates waiting to be downloaded but i didn't proceed because it was well over 200mb of downloads. figured i'd just pull them at my job

the weird thing is the 100mb in 4-5 minutes
from what i saw there is no way that mifi could pull 20mb a minute

 

[klyph]

from what i saw there is no way that mifi could pull 20mb a minute

It can if you're paying $/MB!

I used to pay per MB, and my speeds (edge) were pretty good, not great, but good for a cell network. Then I switched to unlimited and my speed plummeted. It's not even really usable anymore, except for email push and light browsing.

You're getting screwed.

 

[Battle Pope]

Their billing system probably just fucked up the data pull from the network monitors would be my guess.