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Eagle bankrupts science project with international roaming charges

Joes Place

HR King
Aug 28, 2003
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Even Eagles Have Data Roaming Limits, Researchers Find
When one bird being tracked by Russian scientists flew to Iran, its transmitter sent a flood of text messages that ate up the tracking budget.


Elena Shnayder, a scientist based in Siberia who works for the conservation network, said in a phone interview on Saturday that the team had equipped the 13 steppe eagles with tracking devices that send text messages with their coordinates four times a day.

Every time a message is sent back, the Russian company operating the eagles’ SMS transmitters, MegaFon, bills the network. The scientists expected to receive periodic text messages when the eagles flew over countries.

Ms. Shnayder said the team also had expected to lose track of some eagles over the summer, but then they lost contact with Min. When he reappeared in Iran in early October, the researchers gasped when they began receiving a rush of data.

Hundreds of text messages flooded in from Min at once, each costing 49 rubles, or 77 cents — more than five times the expected price — and blowing through the project’s budget.

“He disappeared for five months, and all of a sudden here he is, with a very, very heavy phone bill,” Ms. Shnaider said.

The bird, which the team had been monitoring since 2018, seems to have flown for months in areas without coverage, mostly in Kazakhstan. The roaming messages were sent all at once when it connected to a network in Iran.


Ms. Shnayder said the eagle’s data wiped out the researchers’ phone credit, which had already been depleted by eagles that flew to Iran, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.

The conservation group has resorted to a crowdfunding campaign to cover the extra costs. As of Friday evening, it had raised $5,000, she said. The money will help track birds throughout 2020, the group wrote in a message posted on the Russian social network VK.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/world/europe/eagles-data-roaming-charges.html
 
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