iPhone Bill a Whopping 52 Pages Long

PoliTech writes "iPhone bills are surprisingly large - 'Xbox Large', according to Ars technica: 'AT&T's iPhone bills are quite impressive in their own right. We're starting to get bills for the iPhone here at Ars, and while many of us have had smartphones for some time, we've never seen a bill like this. One of our bills is a whopping 52 pages long, and my own bill is 34 pages long. They're printed on both sides, too. What gives? The AT&T bill itemizes your data usage whenever you surf the Internet via EDGE, even if you're signed up for the unlimited data plan. AT&T also goes into an incredible amount of detail to tell you; well, almost nothing. For instance, I know that on July 27 at 3:21 p.m. I had some data use that, under the To/From heading, AT&T has helpfully listed as Data Transfer. The Type of file? Data. My total charge? $0.00. This mind-numbing detail goes on for 52 double-sided pages (for 104 printed pages!) with absolutely no variance except the size of the files.' You would think that a data company would have a more efficient billing process."

Comments

It's called detailed billing

[Wireless Joe]

and you can have it removed by a single request to customer service. What a non-issue. Of course, if detailed billing wasn't offered by default, I'm sure there would be people whining that they're not being told where their charges are coming from.

Re:Someone got $3000 bill for using iPhone in Euro

[tomhudson]

its $0.005 per kb - half a cent per kilobit,or 4 cents per kilobyte (more like 5 cents if you include data tranfer overhead, etc). In other words, $50 per megabyte.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilobit
kb = kilobits, same as mb = megabits, not bytes. kB == kilobytes.

Today's front page of slashdot weights in at 517KB - that's over half a megabyte. At that rate, $3000 is just over 100 page views.

That's why you surf the lighter-weight versions of pages: http://slashdot.org/palm/ gives a front page that weighs only 8 KB. A page view at those rates is a dime, instead of $25.00

The slashdot.wml file http://slashdot.org/slashdot.wml is even smaller - 1,471 bytes, or 6 cents.

6 cents for a page using wml, a dime using wap, or $25.00 for "the full experience."

Re:AT&T Billing

[DavidTC]

No no no. SBC bought the corpse that was AT&T, and renamed itself AT&T, but Cingular was a joint venture between that and Bellsouth. Then the new AT&T bought Bellsouth.

To recap:

AT&T & AT&T Wireless exist, with the former owning the latter

AT&T Wireless fails, is bought by Cingular from AT&T. Cingular is a joint venture of Bellsouth and SBC.

AT&T is bought by SBC, which then names itself AT&T.

SBC (Calling itself AT&T) buys Bellsouth. Now Cingular is a joint venture of SBC (Calling itself AT&T) and Bellsouth (owned entirely by SBC, which is, again, calling itself AT&T) or, in other words, wholely owned by SBC, aka, AT&T.

They rename Cingular AT&T.