So the provider will cut service to voice and texts as a precautionary measure, yet not cut service to the most-expensive part of their roaming plan; data?
hixbot :
Overages should be illegal, any extra data usage above your plan should be a pro-rated charge at the same cost per MB as found in the standard plan. There is no way a cell carrier can justify that they need to charge 1000 times more per MB if you go over some arbitrary data cap.
That being said, why didn't this girl's parents take the cell phone away? Also why wasn't she using wifi? New York city has at least 1 open wifi network on every block.
I think that overage fees are excessive with most providers, but this case was about roaming vs. overage. Though to play devil's advocate, providers might argue that they plan for a certain amount of load based on a pre-determined per-user usage. And high outliers tax their systems more than expected. Then again, there are also a lot of minimal data users. So I can't imagine that the average changes much. It just ends up being a cash grab.
Regarding overage fees, I really respect how Ting mobile (a MVNO operating on the Sprint network) does it. You can select a basic data package size, with sizes of like 200MB, 500MB, 1GB, 2GB, and 3GB getting set (and reasonable) monthly prices. If you end up going to the next-larger bin, all you get charged is for that next-larger bin price (they don't care if you went beyond your initial set amount). No overage fees. If you go beyond 3GB, you pay per-MB beyond 3GB at the equivalent MB cost for the 3GB package (it's not a lot, $0.02/MB, and there's no upper limit)