US Roaming Add-on - Cheated!

[peosteve]

I use the app My Data Manager on my phone and it's very accurate. I'm over two months into my three month cycle, and My Data Manager is showing 6.19 GB used versus my PM control panel showing 6.31 GB, a 2% difference.

I just returned from a trip to NYC and got the roaming package, which includes 250 MB of data. My Data Manager is showing roaming use of 206 MB, an 18%. Luckily, my trip was almost over, but because my data maxed out, I wasn't able to download my boarding pass.

How does PM ensure that we're not getting cheated by the US provider? I understand if my on-phone tracking and account tracking have slight differences, but when they're almost 20% different, that's pretty bad.

What recourse do we have? I had set alarms to send me a text when I reached 75% and 95% of my usage, but when I'm being given less data than I'm supposed to, I can only feet cheated...and again, it ended up affecting me downloading my boarding pass, which made things more difficult for me...

[peosteve]

Excellent suggestion!
I think this would be a great feature for the non-existent app!

[will13am]

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@peosteve wrote:
Thanks for your answer, @will13am. I too was with Wind and since I paid per use when roaming, I just throttled my own use.
On this trip, I was going for 5 days, so set up My Data Manager to alert me when I was using more than 50MB in a day. I understand that my measurement and theirs will never match, but how the hell am I supposed to know what my usage is, on the go, when it's wildly inaccurate with respect to my on-phone measurement? I could log into my PM control panel (and use data doing THAT!), but that just seems stupid.

My take on it? We're PM's customers. If their US provider isn't quite calculating the data as they do, they should give us a little more to make up for it or figure something else out. 250MB for 10 days is already a pittance, but when rounding takes up almost 20% of the allotment, I think that's really unreasonable.

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Put in a labs suggestion for them to review the roaming data metering. 

[peosteve]

Thanks for your answer, @will13am. I too was with Wind and since I paid per use when roaming, I just throttled my own use.
On this trip, I was going for 5 days, so set up My Data Manager to alert me when I was using more than 50MB in a day. I understand that my measurement and theirs will never match, but how the hell am I supposed to know what my usage is, on the go, when it's wildly inaccurate with respect to my on-phone measurement? I could log into my PM control panel (and use data doing THAT!), but that just seems stupid.

My take on it? We're PM's customers. If their US provider isn't quite calculating the data as they do, they should give us a little more to make up for it or figure something else out. 250MB for 10 days is already a pittance, but when rounding takes up almost 20% of the allotment, I think that's really unreasonable.

[nishufan]

Usually, the android or ios tracked the data usage is more accurate than an app as those apps may not have full system access to see where data is being used or may calculate usage differently, but the carrier always recorded more data usage than the phone. That's very common, there are many situations caused that. For example, your carrier will calculate your data at the start day of your billing cycle. For Android's internal data counter, it depends on the data usage cycle setting, so that may cause some differences.

[will13am]

@peosteve, you probably have zero recourse.  I know that Public Mobile specifically mentions on their fine print that they round data to 10k.  I think whenever data pauses for a certain period of time, the rounded up usage is placed into the data meter.  Over time, lots of round off due to small amounts of intermittent data can add up to a measurable error.  Now, when you roam on a Public Mobile partner carrier, you are subject to whatever round off they do and it could be substantial.  I recall when I was with Wind and roaming on Rogers.  The roundoff was to the nearest MByte!  The charge was 5c per MByte, which is somewhat reasonable.  However, over the period of a day, there would be ton of data interruptions leading to a round off every time.  I easily rack up a buck a day in charges from just syncing emails.