Study Shows Carriers Often Over- and Undercharge for Data

srich27 said:
Well, even a 0.001% error can lead to quite a few people getting overcharged. I didn't look very long, so I only grabbed a number from 2008, but back then AT&T had just shy of 100M subscribers. Even at only a 0.001% error rate, that's still 100,000 people with billing errors. Most of those are likely to be negligible, but I'm sure quite a few of those get quite messed up. Of course, that's assuming that only one computer handled all 100M subscriptions, and assuming they have no QA double-check before sending out bills. Neither of which are likely to be true.

1. 0.001% of 100M is 1000 (not 100,000).
2. I was inferring on the data error, not the number of subscribers impacted.

Basically, for every 100KB of data transmitted, it is acceptable to have that counted as 100K +/- 1.

1MB -> +/- 10 Bytes
100MB -> +/- 1KB
1GB -> +/- 10KB

Basically, even if someone had 1 GB of data transmission, the acceptable amount of error would be 10KB!