Yesterday, I went to Starhub service centre to get more details about my data usage that amount to that HUGE charges in my bill. I talked to a nice guy who showed me a detailed log file containing every single site that I accessed, complete with its file size, time stamp, and all minute details you can think of.
The person showed me a column that he said containing the page size that I accessed (in Excel). We summed up that column, came out 226000, which according to him was in KB. 226,000 KB is close to 237 MB shown in my bill. Fair enough.
I asked the person to sort based on that column. The largest page I accessed was in http://m.google.com/ domain. The size column showed around 14000. I’m sure that column was in bytes, therefore the page size was about 14KB. The person insisted it was in KB, making that page size 14MB!! We’re talking about 1000 times difference here.
Singapore Rain Locations
Scroll up a few lines, we could see this line: http://www.nea.gov.sg/cms/mss/gif/rainloc0.gif (shown above) amounted to 8579 in size. It makes perfect sense that it’s 8579 bytes, therefore 8.5KB. The person, again, still insists it’s 8.5MB!! Now, try loading that image in your browser, right click, look at its properties, and tell me how on earth that image can be 8.5MB? Even the photos from my digital camera were only half of that size. Moreover I said, if I could load that image in my phone in 2 seconds, does that mean Starhub network speed can go 4.25MB/sec? Heck, even my broadband at home can’t do that.
The person continued to give lame answers that would be passable to other non-IT-savvy users, but I eat bytes, KB, and MB for lunch, I know the differences. The person probably gave up trying to convince me with those lame answers, he promised to call me back later. I went back to my office, and about 6.30pm, he called me again, saying that he has checked and confirmed with the IT department, it was in KB, to which I replied “Check again, and call me back after you get more reasonable answer.”
About 8pm, he called me again, he told me, he has tried to load NEA website, clocking up 100KB from loading the page, and would need to get a few pages before he can hit the page where I could get that image. Well, I replied: “First, I bookmarked that image, so I don’t need to go through few pages to see if it’s raining in Singapore or not. Second, if the home page was 100KB, in order to hit 8.5MB, I would have need to visit 85 pages just to know if it’s raining or not??!!”
He gave up and offered to waive all the extra data charges this month, and will monitor again for my next bill. Good. Unless you can prove how I clocked up 237MB in a month when I have used less than 10MB each month for the past year, you should not try to charge enormous phone bill. Yeah, I know there’s a cap at $36, but still, that extra $30 is enough for my 6 months subscriptions. I’m not letting go easily, especially knowing that Starhub log file didn’t show that I did anything extra (like Youtube) in that month.
To be fair to that guy who helped me, besides the lame excuses, he actually did a good job, trying to cover up what I think was an accounting mistake on Starhub part.
Tonight, I came home, surprised to see a tweet from Starhub, offering help to check for me. I’m surprised to know that Starhub actually checks Twitter and address issues of its customers who complains in Twitter. Excellent job I would say. That Starhub Twitter account was created in 15 Feb 2009, so I think they’re only starting to use this popular online medium to reach out to customers.
Tweet from Starhub
This worries me! I wonder how many other less tech-savvy users got cheated by their dubious accounting!
Comment by INK — February 26, 2009 @ 10:52 pm