Offsetting my Air Travel (and then some)

As many people know, I tend to fly around the world a lot. A long time ago, back in about 2006 or 2007 I think, I signed up with Dopplr and put my travel in there. I did this mostly so I could hook up with friends I knew online as I travelled around the world. Well, this only actually resulted in actual meetups with friends once or twice I can remember, notably a few cocktails with [Randal Schwartz](http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/ in Hawai'i during our respective travels across the Pacific in opposite directions.

But one thing it did get me in the habit of doing is recording my travel accurately. Especially air travel. And at some point, it started having carbon footprint reporting functionality integrated.

It's not 100% accurate, but it's a good approximation. For instance, the precise carbon footprint of an air flight would be dependent on the model of aircraft, how full loaded the aircraft was, even the flight time, path, etc. But such precision is not necessary for its use as a crude footprint tool.

But it did let me know that since I've been recording my travel, it has been been responsible for 25 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. I think I offset just one flight before.

Well, I just went and offset all 25 Tonnes of it. Of course buying offsets is all about buying them from the right place, and I found a great directory: the Carbon Catalog, which seemed to be very inclusive and included sites I'd heard positive reviews of before. Wary of the possibility that some programmes are not providing real offsets, I looked into a few of them, and preferred:

• projects which I understood how the offsets worked to really result in a lower CO₂ levels in the world,

• projects which had independent certifications, in particular the certification known as the "Gold Standard"

• projects which did not sell credits for the lowest price, under the "too good to be true" principal.

• companies based in countries that have an emissions trading scheme

The projects I chose were priced around US$10 - $20 per tonne, so my 25 tonnes come to about $350. Not bad really, especially if you consider that the actual cost of those flights and travel over those years could have been as high as $10,000.

And in fact, because it's Christmas, I went and bought my descendents a present - 25 tonnes of CO₂ offset I didn't need to purchase.

I chose these programmes:

• TerraPass - they have three programs, and I bought 10,000lb of offsets from each of them.

• Carbonfund.org - they have a variety of projects, and a relatively cheap (but certainly not dodgy cheap) price per unit, and I bought 10 tonnes from them from their "basket"

• Climate friendly - an Australian company, I bought 4 tonnes from them.

• South Pole Carbon Asset Management Ltd - a Swiss company, with emphasis on certification. I bought a total of 24 tonnes from this company, with 4 projects - a Taiwanese wind farm, an Indonesian geothermal plant, as well as reforestation projects in Uganda and Columbia.

I haven't yet crunched the numbers to see whether or not I'm carbon neutral or not, but my rough understanding is that air travel is by far the most substantial contribution to one's carbon footprint that there is. Plus there's all my travel before 2007 - notably two and a half return trips to the UK from New Zealand I need to offset - which I'll get to in time.

In the mean time, I've offset the lion's share of my carbon footprint for myself, and for one other person in the world like me who doesn't yet believe in this stuff, or at least not enough to spend good money on it.

And my new year's resolution? Well, all my fitness stuff is already taken care of, so I can't count that twice. So, I guess my new resolution can be to keep being carbon-negative.

I invite all those who are concerned about the future of the planet to join me in this pledge of double-offsetting.

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La Quinta 2012 Signature

Verification instructions for Unix command-line:

$ gpg --recv-key 0x176D68BDF01AD228
gpg: requesting key F01AD228 from hkp server pgp.net.nz
gpg: key F01AD228: "Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net>" not changed
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg:              unchanged: 1
$ curl http://vilain.net/talk/fit/la_quinta_2012/waiver.html |
     gpg --verify
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 15203  100 15203    0     0  26596      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 35438
gpg: Signature made Fri Dec  9 12:53:24 2011 PST using RSA key ID F01AD228
gpg: Good signature from "Sam Vilain <sam@vilain.net>"
$

Letter to the court

This is my communication with my case manager at the Ministry of Justice:

The correspondance from Referee Smallbone writes:

The claim is dismissed.

The applicant did not appear. The respondent did appear.

Reasons

The Tribunal presented its findings following the hearing on 13th December 2010.

There has been no new evidence presented today that would change the decision and find in the applicant's favour.

The case was adjourned at Vodafone's request. I had no evidence to present, in fact I was not allowed to present any new evidence, I believe.

Vodafone were supposed to explain their communications to me, which were demonstrably false. This ruling does nothing to explain what explanation Vodafone gave for these false communications.

Please explain why the case was dismissed without there being an answer to this.

However the referee ruled that the tribunal could not rule on the section of the Fair Trading Act 1986 that I chose to use and so the case was entirely held under the Consumer Guarantees Act. Would it be possible to raise another case, under the Fair Trading Act?

Court Ruling

I got the final ruling from the court in the post today, co-inciding with a concise Consumer Magazine article about my case.

As I didn't appear on time to the court case, Vodafone did not need to explain their communications. The Judge ignored the merits of the case as they stood at the end of the previous half of the hearing, and dismissed the claim. I guess that's how the game works.

Below is the message I am sending to Vodafone to negotiate payment:

[Name], as you know I failed to make it to the court case, my mistake.

I'm assuming that you are going to exploit this inability of myself to play the game to Vodafone's advantage and to my detriment.

It is still my position that the text message sent to me saying I'd used 50%, 100% of my data pack constituted a False Representation under section 13 of the Fair Trading Act 1986. As you know the referee mentioned that I could take up a separate claim under that Act.

The roaming usage I did after foolishly thinking Vodafone were offering a service at a fair and reasonable price, as Referee Smallbone was so surprised that I would think would be likely, and as Vodafone did communicate to me via several channels, constitutes approximately $850 of the bill.

The referee's summary notes are scant, but as you recall, the other part of the bill which the referee found was all due to me foolishly trusting the validity your on-line usage tools, that an invoice would cover the dates marked on the bill, and for not reading the entirety of the small print on the terms and conditions and therefore underestimating my real usage.

Of course I disagree with the judgement, and if Vodafone decides to be honest on the record about the dire problems they have with communicating their mobile rates, and:

1. add warnings to the mobile data roaming query tool that information is out of date, and
2. add a break-down by date and billing network as you would expect on a credit card bill to the "details" section of the roaming charges of invoices, and
3. write off my bill,

Then I will ensure that Consumer Magazine are made aware of how Vodafone have changed from dishonest to honest business practice, and encourage them to include a positive follow-up article in a subsequent issue.

Therefore I would like to make a payment arrangement over an 18 month term for the entire amount which Vodafone is claiming I still have to pay despite much of it being unlawful. Please let me know how I can make such payments and I will begin them.

Respectfully, Sam Vilain.

A couple of recent observations

My previous posts were written right after the court case; now, I have the benefit of some hindsight as well as some interesting interactions with people who work at Vodafone.

The first is that despite Vodafone's claims in court, they have been working towards notifications, now apparently sent out at 5MB and 8MB of usage. In court, the Vodafone rep claimed that "customers did not want that". Apparently, this has recently gone to production, in the last 2-3 weeks.

Another thing I did was I managed to get out at Kiwifoo, and he actually said that one thing he had always hoped they would do was put more prominent warnings on the online usage page about the charges being delayed.

Whether that didn't happen deliberately or due to incompetence is up to you to decide.

Sadly, my court case closed on Monday and in the warm afterglow of holiday mode I completely forgot to attend; the case manager at the district court says I may be able to ask for a re-hearing. Hopefully I didn't just lose by default. But it does mean I didn't get to hear Vodafone's excuse for sending out the text messages.

I may still be able to take them up on the clause of the Fair Trading Act that I didn't use before, as the previous case was under the Consumer Guarantees Act. I'll be filing that once I hear back from the court. Using a section they have jurisdiction over this time. I think I can use at least section 11 and section 13

Vilain v Vodafone NZ Ltd : preliminary ruling

Short summary: I tried to use a "bad" section of the Fair Trading Act, the judge just didn't buy my argument ($1300 now owing I guess), and adjourned on one point (worth $850) pending explanation from Vodafone.

Though, it wasn't entirely bad; the message telling me that I was using my data bundle is a bit hard to argue against. Irritating thought is that despite Vodafone having had much time to note and prepare a response to that part, the judge allowed that the case be adjourned, perhaps to February, when the Vodafone representative claimed that he hadn't seen that bit before and needed to check up on it. So this is going to drag on a bit.

I had a friendly Radio NZ reporter meet me in the waiting room, and talked with them about the case before I went in, but unfortunately given the ruling it's now not newsworthy.

Court Limitations

Upon the court hearing starting, I was informed that the section of the Fair Trading Act I was attempting to use - Section 9 - could not be ruled on in the disputes tribunal. If I'd have known that, I could possibly have structured my arguments differently. He did say that I could later take the case up with the district court if I so chose, as he would not be ruling either way on it. However, he heard the substance of the claims anyway without reference to the potential statute, which was good. He also did fairly well to try to understand and follow up on points that I made.

But anyway without the ability to claim "generally misleading and deceptive conduct", my case was quite limited. Had I known at the time, I could perhaps have tried under Section 11,

No person shall, in trade, engage in conduct that is liable to mislead the public as to the nature, characteristics, suitability for a purpose, or quantity of services.

I also mentioned that it was a matter of fact that the prices were extortion, referring to the EU and OECD rulings; he said that I couldn't bring charges against the Consumer Guarantees Act on that count because there was a fee schedule.

Lesson learned: always find as many applicable sections of a piece of law when laying charges so you have fall-back options

The information was available to me

The judge ruled that I did have the information available to me; in the form of Vodafone's web site, and that I was "blazé" and "light on checking on information" before I left.

He said that delayed charges were natural to expect, like with a Visa bill. I did tell him, sure but with Visa the balance updates immediately so you can always check it in real time, but that point seemed to have been lost on the judge.

He said from his readings of the text messages that "no large jumps of logic" were required to infer that I was on a $10/MB rate or zone.

Lesson learned: when dealing with companies that have long terms and conditions, assume the worst and hammer their call centres with requests for information.

Deceptive Invoicing

The judge did not accept that the level of information shown on the bill was not sufficient for reconciliation. He seemed to always go back to the fact that the invoice did have a $10/MB bit on it. Also, there was some small print I missed, in fact here is the relevant section of the invoice:

Note also the little disclaimer at the bottom of that summary; I had missed that, and it does bear relevance to my claims. Silly me, not checking every single line of every single piece of correspondance sent to me.

It's a little strange that the "Summary" section in fact contains more information than the "Details" section. So, my initial claim that the amount was not broken down, Vodafone were able to counter by saying, sure it was, look. But it rather missed the point I was trying to make: that there was no information about the date on which the usage was related to. As you would expect on your Visa bill, or in the rest of the invoice for instance.

The Vodafone representative successfully misdirected the judge on this point in fact, making the straw-man argument that they don't list every single data session, it would be information overload and "most people don't want that". I tried to make the point to the judge that there is actually an obvious middle ground, which is aggregation (no, I didn't use that term), but the point seemed to be lost on him completely.

I'm not sure how I could have avoided that misdirection, or actually gotten the crux of what I was saying across to the judge. But then again, he didn't have to care, because the only fault with this information is that it is deceptively communicated, and he had already said he wasn't going to rule on that.

Deceptive Communications

The judge ruled that "no large jumps of logic" were required to infer that these messages:

• 26th July, 2:26AM : You've arrived in Zone 3! To pay your std NZ home rate + $3 per min for calls from zone3, get 'Traveller' our zone pricing. For info go to vodafone.co.nz/travel
• 26th July, 2:26AM : 3G,V Live! & mobile data is available on SmarTone.2 enjoy these services remain on this network. Charges of NZ$10/MB apply & will b billed 2 yr NZ account
• 27th July, 7:40AM: You've arrived in Zone 2! To pay your std NZ home rate + $2 per min for calls from zone2, get 'Traveller' our zone pricing. For info go to vodafone.co.nz/travel
• 27th July, 7:40AM: 3G,V Live! & mobile data is available on SFR.2 enjoy these services remain on this network.Charges of NZ$10/MB apply & will b billed 2 yr NZ account
• 30th July, 4:05AM: 3G,V Live! & mobile data is available on Swisscom. To enjoy these services remain on this network. Charges of NZ$10/MB apply & will b billed 2 yr NZ account

implied that I'd pay $10/MB on every network in these Zones. That I hadn't received messages upon registering on new networks? Apparently, Vodafone have cut down on these messages, due to complains by customers, about them being "spam". So I was just unlucky that a Vodafone network was number 8 or whatever the cut-off is where they decide that you've got the message and that you know what the price is, despite every message communicating the mobile data rate including the term "on this network"

It seems that Vodafone can just claim for any withheld information, that some customers requested that. On the "bill shock" policy to limit the amount of spend? No, customers don't want that.

Well, what can you do. I was genuinely misled by the information at hand to me, but apparently, sorry that's my own fault. "What did I expect?" asked the Judge, leaving it wide open for very cynical comment that of course was irrelevant to the court. I guess I certainly couldn't expect sensible anti-bill shock legislation from our inept government. So I guess I have to take this part on the chin.

The semi-successful claim

These two messages, however, the judge did rule were highly suspicious;

• August 6th, 7:59AM: You've used 50% of your 100MB data bundle. When you exceed your data bundle out of bundle rates will apply. More details at vodafone.co.nz
• August 10th, 8:00AM: You've used 100% of your 100MB data bundle. Out of bundle rates now apply. More details at vodafone.co.nz

So there still is some hope. The above messages, along with the inadequacy of their billing system to deliver data on time (apparently, a "new billing system" has been implemented in some countries which is "not as real time" as the older one), are what left me thinking that the Vodafone IT network was not "another network" in terms of my billing.

The usage on Vodafone networks I incurred after that first message is still about $850. That's about half of what I was claiming.

However the Vodafone representative claimed to be missing pages from his print-out and missed those messages. This, despite having been served with the claims in question. And the judge allowed them time to go away and try to come up with an excuse.

Summary

I find it disappointing that the disputes tribunal is limited in what it can enforce in Acts on a section-by-section basis. I also find it annoying that they left it until the actual hearing to tell me that. That rather undermined my case, and if I had time to prepare for that I could have perhaps found out what sections I could have used.

Vodafone have now got the opportunity to come up with whatever excuse they can figure out until February as to why those erroneous messages from their system make sense.

I guess they won this battle, but the war isn't over yet...

Still, based on this experience I think I prefer the court of public opinion; it can inflict greater damages.

Vilain v Vodafone NZ Ltd

Long delay between updates intentional, for ironic effect.

Tomorrow, I have a court case with Vodafone NZ Ltd, over an extortionate roaming data bill.

Sure, sure, it's not like this is anything new or special, people have known about this for a long time. "highway robbery" writes one well-known industry commentator, showing that the mark-up is of the order of 100,000%. Yes, one-hundred, thousand percent. "Legal Theft", brands another. There are frequently stories in the papers, such as:

• 3News (article offline, I have only the synopsis) - Nicole Skews owes $6k after a month of using her phone overseas - $6000 Vodafone bill - what's up with that?
• Liz Price charged $3,500 for two hours of use
• Stories abound in this iPhone users forum

So, it's not like I'm not aware of all of this. Far from it, I was acutely aware, and did everything I could to try to avoid it - apart from doing the sensible thing, which was closing my Vodafone account and switching to a pre-pay provider so this can't happen.

Big mistake.

My claims; or what went wrong

My claims revolve around two material breaches of fair trading practice;

1. Deceptive invoicing, and
2. Deceptive communication of roaming rates and charges.

Deceptive Invoicing

So, I was overseas, at sea aboard the Voyager (I'd got a cheap fare; can't complain at US$10/night), and I'd been using my data up that point, quite reservedly. My August Invoice came through.

Pages from the Vodafone August Invoice

Let's take a look at the detail of that first section:

Look, the invoice covers the period up to the 1st of August.

And let's look at the detail of the roaming charges section:

At the time, I thought, well, that's not too bad, if that's my roaming charge up to the 1st, then it's not as bad as I thought it might be. I'll start using it more - but I'll start using the on-line self-service tool to make sure it doesn't get out of hand.

I would have been far more alerted to the seriousness of the situation, had it reasonably summarised the information actually available in their billing database, rather than collapsing it into a single figure:

Country	Date	Operator	Usage (MiB)	Charge
AUS	2010-07-25	Vodafone Australia	4.12	$8.24
HKG	2010-07-25	SmarTone.2	1.66	$16.59

That might have alerted me to the situation at hand: that the invoice does not include billing information which is yet to be forwarded from the other providers, despite;

• This being the 21st Century, in an age where networks are fast, and able to transfer information like that in a near instant if properly configured to do so, and
• There being details of other roaming use on the bill right up until the last day the invoice covers, and
• There being absolutely no warning at all on the invoice that the information is not up to date.
• Pre-pay operators being perfectly able to, in real time, stop you from using more data than you have credit.

As I was later to discover, here is a real picture of the charges I had racked up, by what I thought was conservative use of my phone (mostly doing map lookups, and use of navigate while driving a hire car):

Country	Date	Operator	Usage (MiB)	Charge
AUS	2010-07-25	Vodafone Australia	4.12	$8.24
HKG	2010-07-25	SmarTone.2	1.66	$16.59
AUS	2010-07-25	Vodafone Australia	4.12	$8.24
HKG	2010-07-25	SmarTone.2	1.66	$16.59
FRA	2010-07-26	SFR.2	2.01	$20.12
HKG	2010-07-26	SmarTone.2	13.34	$133.44
FRA	2010-07-27	SFR.2	35.63	$356.30
FRA	2010-07-28	SFR.2	2.64	$26.43
CHE	2010-07-29	?? Swiss other	1.85	$18.47
FRA	2010-07-29	SFR.2	0.90	$8.96
CHE	2010-07-30	?? Swiss other	1.90	$19.02
FRA	2010-07-30	?? France other	1.37	$13.67
FRA	2010-07-30	SFR.2	0.34	$3.44
ITA	2010-07-30	Vodafone Italia	0.75	$7.46
FRA	2010-07-31	?? France other	3.24	$32.42
ESP	2010-08-01	Vodafone Espaol	0.01	$0.10

This information is right out of Vodafone's Billing Database, and it is almost certain that this is the information used to generate the invoices. If I'd have seen the first table, expecting to see usage more like the second table in terms of countries visited, then I could have been alerted to what was happening and curbed my use.

So, Vodafone, why didn't you break down the usage?

Here, I've broken down the usage by the originating country and network operator, as that is how it is displayed on their pricing schedule. It was trivial. SELECT ... GROUP BY, done. What is the problem?

After I submitted my letter, I got the excuse that "it would make the bill longer". A bill which frequently contains line items for calls and text messages of 0 cost - that counter-argument is empty.

You got it buddy, the large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.

I now know (after being referred to the roaming T&C's by a Vodafone dispute manager) that this is mentioned, as a tiny little paranthetised comment buried deep inside some small print. Nonetheless it is my feeling that this level of miscommunication on the invoice is deceptively witholding essential information that Vodafone had about my usage, and therefore, under Part 1 s 9 of the 1986 Fair Trading Act and/or Part 4 s 30 (1) of the Consumer Guarantees Act 1993, constitutes "Misleading and deceptive conduct generally".

So firstly, I claim damages equal to the amount which the invoice purported to cover, but didn't. Which is the difference between the totals of the two above tables.

Deceptive Communication of Roaming Rates and Charges

During my travels, I travelled through a lot of different countries, and joined a lot of overseas networks.

I was greeted on joining each of them, with text messages like this:

• 25th July, 9:52AM: Vodafone welcomes you to Oz! For queries call us on 777. For voicemail call 707. International charges apply for both
• 25th July, 9:53AM: Data roaming charges r now just NZ$2/MB until 31Aug10 so u can work or play online. This is avail on ALL aussie networks &all devices. See vodafone.co.nz 4 info
• 25th July, 9:53AM: To pay your standard NZ home rate for calls made whilst in Oz get 'Traveller' our zone pricing for calling when overseas. For info go to vodafone.co.nz/travel
• 26th July, 2:26AM : You've arrived in Zone 3! To pay your std NZ home rate + $3 per min for calls from zone3, get 'Traveller' our zone pricing. For info go to vodafone.co.nz/travel
• 26th July, 2:26AM : 3G,V Live! & mobile data is available on SmarTone.2 enjoy these services remain on this network. Charges of NZ$10/MB apply & will b billed 2 yr NZ account
• 26th July, 2:27AM : Vodafone welcomes u to Hong Kong. 4 queries call us on …

Upon receiving notice of the $10/MB amount (still daylight robbery if you ask me), I complained on Twitter. I can't link to my comment, because I deactivated my twitter account for other reasons, but it drew this response from Vodafone, in particular Paul Brislen. Who, in the words of one well-respected figure in the IT industry, was tasked with "defending the indefensible". Paul Brislen no longer works for Vodafone, one of their PR guys informs me. But it is representative of the way that the telecoms industry justifies this price-fixing arrangement:

Oh, my. You poor largest mobile network operator in the world, you. Held hostage by those mean other networks. My subsequent challenges of this apologist rubbish of course went unanswered.

But anyway, moving on with my travels. I'd been through several countries now, and got many more of these welcome text messages letting me know the price of the service.

• 27th July, 7:39AM: Vodafone welcomes you to France! For queries please call us on 777. For voicemail call 707. International charges apply for both.
• 27th July, 7:40AM: You've arrived in Zone 2! To pay your std NZ home rate + $2 per min for calls from zone2, get 'Traveller' our zone pricing. For info go to vodafone.co.nz/travel
• 27th July, 7:40AM: 3G,V Live! & mobile data is available on SFR.2 enjoy these services remain on this network.Charges of NZ$10/MB apply & will b billed 2 yr NZ account
• 30th July, 4:05AM: 3G,V Live! & mobile data is available on Swisscom. To enjoy these services remain on this network. Charges of NZ$10/MB apply & will b billed 2 yr NZ account

I came to appreciate and expect these text messages as useful warnings of what fees my usage would incur; an expectation of communication standards was set by them.

I'd also been in countries with no Vodafone network up to this point - France and Switzerland. On the 1st of August, I stopped in Barcelona, and explicitly selected Vodafone Español. No messages were sent to my phone on registering on the Spanish Vodafone network.

On the 3rd of August, I arrived in Naples, and explicitly selected Vodafone Italia. Again, no messages were sent to my phone as the non-Vodafone networks had.

Interesting, I thought, so I tried logging onto the online usage tool. I don't have a screenshot of what exactly I saw, but I did notice that my monthly data allocation had started to move down. No roaming use was showing up since the 1st of August, which was what I'd been billed since, and I had only used Vodafone networks after that point.

I would have to eat the words of one of my earlier tweets, I thought. They had actually set it up so that I got local rates on Vodafone networks. Wonders will never cease, I thought.

However I was skeptical and checked my usage regularly over the coming days. No usage showed on the online usage tool for over a week. Related to the other claim is the observation that the online roaming data usage tool does not warn that data is incomplete.

The only feedback I got of my usage from Vodafone over this time was:

• August 6th, 7:59AM: You've used 50% of your 100MB data bundle. When you exceed your data bundle out of bundle rates will apply. More details at vodafone.co.nz
• August 10th, 8:00AM: You've used 100% of your 100MB data bundle. Out of bundle rates now apply. More details at vodafone.co.nz

Look at that! I'm using up my data allowance, I thought. Incredible.

I think this is what is meant by "bill shock"

Well, it was too incredible to be true. Fortunately I was in London staying with family after that, so it was possible for me to avoid using mobile data. I got used to using tools like MobileAtlasCreator to download OpenStreetMap maps, so that I could have access to a core set of maps while offline - I used this to for instance keep a complete map of London in my phone. My mobile phone had "the knowledge". I called this and other efforts to concentrate the information that I normally accessed online into an offline format, my "Offline Data Plan". That aside, there was a total of $2,167 for mobile data on my September invoice, which I received while I was in Cork visiting a friend. The invoice is surreal, it had a detailed break-down of how many cents each SMS message I sent cost me, then a single line to tell me how many thousands of dollars my moderate mobile data use cost this month, and a big "Thank you for using Vodafone" statement in large lettering at the bottom. I got this invoice and I really had no clue how that could have happened. I logged onto the online data usage tool, and it didn't even agree with the figure on my invoice; it was only after getting a copy of the raw table data from Vodafone support (a process which took several weeks) that I was able to load this data into a Postgres database, and reconcile what had happened with some SQL queries. Again, yes, I could have noticed on Vodafone's pricing schedule, and seen that the price for Vodafone network usage was just as price-fixed as the next network. I guess if I'd have thought about it or researched it, I could have realised that Vodafone NZ Ltd is not technically the same network as Vodafone Italia or Vodafone UK or whatever. But really, there are multiple very serious communication issues going on here. There is no room for argument that the level of communication is acceptable;

1. Registering on any overseas network should always notify you of the applicable rates, not just on non-Vodafone networks.
2. As mentioned in the other claim, invoices should detail usage by date, country and network operator, to make it clear how much use is being invoiced for.
3. The usage meter tool should carry a warning message that the information may not be up to date (or may be weeks behind, as in my case)
4. Messages sent saying that I am using data from my $10 for 100MB data pack when in fact I am paying $10 for every 1MB for that usage are misleading, in fact constitute a material breach of the Fair Trading Act on their own as far as I'm concerned.

On the basis of this miscommunication, I am claiming that none of my usage on overseas Vodafone networks is a fair fee for services.

Summary

Vodafone have yet to respond meaningfully to the letter I wrote to them (actually, the JP-sighted statutory declaration I served to them via registered mail) in September, outlining my issues with the bill they had sent me. I offered to pay $322.76 for the use that I did incur over the time, being the original amount with the two categories detailed above removed.

My declaration to them makes essentially the same points I lay out in this post. All I got was a phone call from some tool who obviously disagreed on behalf of Vodafone NZ with everything I wrote, though of course could offer no reasonable basis for this. I told him to come back with an offer close enough to my $322.76 for me to consider just accepting it.

There used to be a day where they would write off charges like this entirely, but it seems those days are over. They came back with an offer of a 25% discount. I told them I'd see them in court.

They basically ignored my claim and even referred my overdue amount to a debt collector. I called up that company and asked them if that was normal when there is a pending court case for it; they said that no, that Vodafone should really not have referred the amount to them.

My court case is to be heard in the Wellington Disputes Tribunal tomorrow (Monday 13th December) at 1:30pm, case ID DT CIV-2010-085-001035

Our visit to the 168°E 47°S confluence

This article is about me and a couple of mates and our expedition into one of the three remaining Degree Confluence points on land in New Zealand. These confluence points are where lines of latitude (aka parallels) intersect with lines of longitude. There are 29 points altogether in New Zealand, and the project has been running for some time, so the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked - including all the points in the mainland United States. We visited the intersection of the 47th Southern Parallel with the 168th Eastern Line of Longitude, or 168°0′0″E 47°0′0″S. This is the furthest South confluence point in New Zealand. The article below was submitted as the narrative accompanying our visit, and is intended to be read by those curious 'what is at that point in the world'?

With a bit of luck, there should be a video montage on YouTube of some footage I took leading up to arriving at the confluence. It's about 35s over the length limit, but I can't get pitivi to successfully render any of my edits of it.

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Practicality