- Wednesday, 10 February 2010
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
What a world! What a world! - The Wicked Witch of the West
Snow Leopard drives up Aussie phone bills
A COMPUTER TRAINING COMPANY in Docklands, Australia saw its telephone bill increase by more than tenfold after it installed the latest version of Apple's Mac OS X.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Melissa Foote, principal of Total Business Service and Training, her outfit experienced some major problems because of the way that Snow Leopard backed up data and synchronised it.
She was talking to Apple about possible redress, but remains concerned that other network administrators are suffering the same issue but might not realise they have problems until they get their phone bills.
Normally the outfit had a bill of $320 Aussie dollars but it was billed for almost $3,000 during one period. The problem was that Snow Leopard insisted on backing up several gigabytes of data daily to synchronise the Mac's data using Apple's MobileMe. That's a subscription service where users store backup data at a remote 'cloud' facility over the Internet.
Australia's dominant telco and ISP, Telstra apparently charges subscribers based upon the amount of data transferred over their broadband links.
Also a Mac user at home, she noticed her phone bill was also higher than normal, which she also attributed to the software upgrade to Snow Leopard.
The problem was so bad that the company was considering reverting to the older version of the Mac OS, version 10.5.
It was planning to upgrade some training computers from Windows XP to Macs but has put that on hold. µ
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
Simple solution! Change your isp and get one that doen't charge that way. Maybe then Telstra will learn when they start loosing customers
It's not just OSX which has updates, Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 all have updates from time to time, as do Linux distributions.
So technically this could affect her whatever OS she uses.
If she's on such a low usage allowance maybe she should look at either increasing her usage allowance with the ISP or change the ISP if possible.
If not, why not implement an caching proxy server which caches the updates (IPCop with Update Accelerator for instance) or download the update packages and burn them to disc (if possible).
I think I'm starting to see what others are saying now, bias against Apple from some writers, and bias against Linux from other writers.
Rob
Read the article again Rob, this is not updates but online backup
Nick, try it sometime. People might show you a little more respect if you do.
Telstra have a completely loony pricing structure for ADSL usage. Their top package (AU$ 150/month) gives you an allowance of 60GB. Use more than that and they'll charge you AU$ 0.15/megabyte. That's a whopping AU$ 150/GB. That AU$ 3000 bill represents going from 60 to 69GB/month. One has to assume that they were using more than 25GB/month before hand or they would have been on a cheaper package so the increase in data usage isn't as spectacular as you claim.
The authors of the original article do point out one blindingly obvious fact though. WHATEVER OS you use, you shouldn't upgrade in a business environment until you've fully tested it.
Yes rob, but my update to windows 7 didnt:
- prevent me using a guest account
- stop me ordering pizza from dominos (reference to flash)
- or in this case, sync with mobileme in anyway it wasn't supposed to
My last update may have "all the problems vista had" but at least it doesn't "have totally new problems".
I mean, when you set the standard at "just working" people are going to pay attention when it "just doesn't"
Hey Rob,
Did you even bother to read the article ?
It was talking about uploads and synch issue with Snow Leopard not downloads and updates to the OS !
Of course all OS have updates to download we all accept that, but when a OS insists on backing up huge amounts of data daily and youre not on the right plan with the right Telco you can get stung with exorbidant phone bills, and thats especially true of rip-off merchants like Telstra
when i installed the new OSX Snow Leopard i read the screen and unchecked the trial of mobile me .. I am very surprised a company that trains people in computers would miss this very simple thing .. If they had not chosen to use the mobile me update they would have no extra downloads .. guess just clicking yes a lot is not the right way to use a computer lol
Hi I am a Mac user with Snow Leopard and the Apple MobileMe service and I have not had this problem. You need to choose which folders are synced back to the cloud (and can also turn the syncing off all together in the MobileMe section of system preferences).
MobileMe is also an optional pay for use service, it is not included as part of Snow Leopard, the users with this problem just have the wrong folders set to sync.
Secondly the title "Snow leopard drives up Aussie phone bills" is inaccurate as it is the Internet Service Provider fees that go up, not phone bills as such. Perhaps they are billing their internet and phone one the same account, but it is still their internet bill going up not the phone bill.
My other comment about not upgraded the training computers to Macs because of this seems odd, as MobileMe is not part of Snow Leopard and as such would not effect them. If they did purchase the MobileMe service for each machine and set it up incorrectly then that would be another story, but at no fault of Apple or Snow Leopard.
"this just in: Apple sucks if you can tell the difference between $300 and $3000"
We know, we know.
In the MacOS preferences you can turn off automatic synchronizing, and just sync manually from time to time.
Firstly, read the article. They aren't talking about system updates. They're talking about online backup service.
Secondly, Telstra/BigPond offers unmetered mirror servers that doesn't count to monthly usage for some Linux distros. (CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and Ubuntu)
= http://mirror.files.bigpond.com/
This effectively nullifies your poor attempt to drag Linux into the argument.
Thirdly, Australia's technically illiterate always go for BigPond as an ISP. They aren't aware of the alternatives, nor do they really understand the plans they sign up to! (The devil is in the details! Many have been tricked into these poor value plans!)
The feature called IDISK is part of Mobile Me and yes it can be turned off.
Snow leopard does not by default use this to backup.
Yet again it shows how stupid users are people this dumb should not be allowed to have any computer PC or Mac.
Maybe the user affected should see if Fisher price make computers!!!!! Lol
This is a rough gestimate from my part as I don't have data to support this but didn't apple beat the drub about Snow Leopard getting full push services for mobileme ?
Remember when they pulled the feature and offered a couple of months to every mobile me user back in 2008 because their servers went down to their knees? I'd bet money that it had something to do with bandwidth and/or network usage...
How bad do you have to be with computers to make a Mac do something wrong?
It says that it backs up to mobile me, over the internet. Now, how much traffic will backing up 1GB of data generate? Any guesses?
Btw, Nick. You're really making a fool of yourself if you're ranting about Time Machine backing several times a day. The initial backup takes it time of course, cause it tranfers all your data to the backup location. After that it's just a few megabytes every hour.
Backing up hourly means that you can loose at most 1 hour of your work. Now, compare that to Windows 7 backup, that I you can only set to run daily and defaults to once per week.
Sorry for those who haven't worked out yet but apple's marketing department (99% of the company) target non technical people that use PC's for reading email and posting on facebook and myspace etc.
Who else is going to pay premium for machines that look pretty but have specifications of a low to mid range system? Yes it boots up fast but it can't run ANY of the programs I need for work and at home.
And it would appear i'm not the only one with this problem. I recently did some work in the Apple office in London and they had quite a few PC's running windows XP of all things... at least they were not foolish enough to adopt vista I guess!
A
All ISPs in Australia charge for GB/Per Month for residential and most business plans.
Anyway, this could be the Tame Apple Press Reponse:
'Aussie Telco stops users from using superb Mac Product: Claims feature is not worthy of Godly image'
Noobs teaching noobs. It's exactly what's happening at that computer training thingy.
MobileMe is not enabled by default. You have to either sign in or register for the free trial to make it happen.
Even then, Time Machine is not enabled by default.
And even then, it does not automatically back up to your iDisk. You have set that as well.
Now, do you still think someone in charge of teaching others how to use a computer should make this many mistakes in a row? On a Mac to boot.