Missing Resources

This past month I went over on my data plan for my cell phone. It cost me an extra $20 + tax. I was caught off guard by this overage since Telus is supposed to send me a text message when I am around 75% of my data usage, then again and 90%, and last month I did not receive those messages.

I called Telus today to ask about the missing messages, and to find out if I can get more details about my data usage.

The Telus rep said “Telus does not guarantee that you will receive those text messages”. The reasoning was due to network congestion, and or routing issues. Hello? Telus is in the business of sending text messages. If it doesn’t send for some reason (say network congestion), send it a little later. They are a telephone company and should easily be able to guarantee sending of a simple text message. Ludicrous.

The rep also mentioned that their website tells me how much data I have used. The big problem there is that they have rolled out a new version of their site and it is ridiculously slow, and sometimes doesn’t load, or doesn’t respond. Nice. I can also call them to find out where I am with my usage. Maybe I should call them every day to check. Nothing like wasting precious/expensive resources to get their attention.

Incidentally, all their website says about the text messages is:

Some plans are not eligible to receive TELUS Data Usage Notifications. Enabling TELUS Data Usage Notifications may not work for your plan.

Then I asked about getting more details on my data usage. I was hoping that if I could find out the urls that were being loaded most often, then I can figure out what apps I was overusing and scale back accordingly. The rep said that all the details are on their site, yet when I checked yesterday, the most detail I could get was a date and time, a size, and how much it cost.

time item amount details
4:32:51 PM 190 Kilobytes $0.00 AirCard

The rep said they don’t have the ability to track this information. Yeah, right. This means there is no way I can double check with any certainty that their billing system is accurate. I have to trust them on this, and when they can’t reliably send a simple text message, why should I trust them on something more complex like tracking data usage?