Every Slinger knows how great it is to catch up on a football game while waiting in an airport, after hours during a business trip, or in the case Wayne Burdick from Illinois, catching a Bears game while waiting for his cruise ship to set sail. What wasn't so great for Wayne, however, was the surprising $27,000 statement from AT&T, his wireless data provider, sent him.

Of course, Wayne first assumed there was an error or fraud, so he called AT&T to have the charge investigated and reversed. After being told the charges were legitimate, it turned out Wayne was billed at international roaming rates while using his Slingbox at port in Miami, which at two cents per kilobyte of data over two and a half hours of slinging is a lot of coin.

It turns out that Wayne's data card connected through the cruise liners onboard network, which would be billed at international roaming rates. What was unclear is why the onboard cellular network was turned on while in port, as most cruise liners shut down these networks when within range of a land based provider.

AT&T did try to send him repeated warnings of the roaming charges via SMS text messages. The problem was they were sent to the number for his data card, which had no ability to receive or display them. Chalk that up to additional bad luck for Wayne, but AT&T should have known better than to send SMS messages to an air card.

After several attempts to resolve the situation with AT&T went nowhere, Wayne wrote up the Fixer Team at the Chicago Sun-Times for a little help getting AT&T to listen to reason. Ultimately, they were able to get AT&T to drop the $27,700+ charge.

This isn't meant to scare you Slingers into never using your Slingbox on the road or over a cellular data network. However, let this be a warning to you to use caution when operating your data card in the vicinity of a cruise liner or when traveling to a place where roaming rates could apply. Always try to verify what network you're connected to before you begin to watch the big game.

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