A 13 year old boy rang up quite a high charge to his father's monthly Verizon Wireless cell phone bill, an additional $22,000. Ted Estarija's son reportedly downloaded 1.4 million kilobytes of cell phone data last month, costing Estarija close to $22,000. The plan that Estarija was covered by did not allow for data usage, so each download was much more expensive then it should have been, had the plan covered data usage, and Estarija was charged more than $50 per megabyte of data, a menacingly high rate. Verizon Wireless eventually credited Estarija's account entirely, after the story made headlines at NBC. Now this begins to trouble me, as the younger generation, in particular teenagers, are becoming so endowed with technology. I have a friend whose little brother has an iPhone, and hes only a fifth grader. When I asked him about his phone, he replied that all the kids in his class have iPhones. What could a fifth grader possibly need an iPhone for? Oh well, I guess times are changing, and the youth is becoming more dependent on technology at an earlier age then ever. But downloading $22,000 of data over your cell phone in my opinion, (I hope you would agree) seems to cross the line. That boy needs to get outside, and go to a Borders to buy his music, not rack up his father's bill.
