According to a news report on Shin Min Daily, a parent complained that her son spent $9000 just by enabling data roaming while on transit in Turkey.
This is shocking as how would roaming charges be so expensive when telcos are charging a few dollars per GB.
If you are a M1 customer, you have to take note that there are various modes of roaming for M1 customers. If you are on the Daily passport, it will cost $7.95 for 24 hours.
Another option is the subscrition to Data Passport which you can choose from various plans for the number of days. The Europe Data Passport costs $65.
The last option is the one that most people ignored but thought that you could just use it for a while. It is known as Pay per Use . It charges at 20 cents per 10 KB.
If you were to calculate :
20 cents per 10 KB, you can calculate the cost for 1 GB
it would cost approximately $20,971.52 to use 1 GB with a charge of 20 cents per 10 KB.
In the case of the subscriber, he probably use 500 MB unknowingly by sending some messages while some background applications were loading images etc.
It is time telcos take a serious look at offering such Pay Per Use plan charges as it is quite 2000X the cost of a 1 GB roam which usually costs around S$10.00