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

AT&T Billing

[fatman22]

Somewhere down inside the quagmire that is AT&T's billing system, you'll probably still find an active tariff for leasing crank-style (think "Lassie") phones to customers. It has never been updated to intelligently handle more recent uses of their communications systems, and heaven forbid you should ever ask one of their people to explain a charge or how to lower the cost of your "service". That's one of several reasons I refuse to do business with them anymore.

Part of the softening-up process

[Animats]

They're preparing you for the day when they start data usage charges. "Unlimited usage" might be just an introductory rate plan. The telcos want to charge you for every download, and clearly they have the billing system in place to do it. You think they went to all the trouble to implement that when it doesn't generate revenue?

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

[gEvil (beta)]

The thing that I find even more disturbing than the $3000 bill is this: "I'm a web developer as part of my career and I couldn't even tell you how many KB the average web page is, no less a text message to my son, an e-mail with a photo to my mother, or a quick check of Google Maps." I can only assume that optimization isn't in this guy's vocabulary.

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

[iamdrscience]

I don't know, that doesn't seem too unreasonable. I mean, I could take a pretty good guess at how big the web pages I write are and how big the images I use are, but just by glancing at any random webpage I don't think my guess would be pretty accurate. Likewise I think it's difficult to guess what would be an "average" size for a webpage. There are just too many variables involved.

Employees hate the billing.

[MikeFM]

Be glad your not an employee. When I worked at Cingular it was a nightmare when customers called in and wanted you to explain their bills. It's so complex and ass backwards that often nobody that works for Cingular can even tell you what it all means. It's pretty stupid when you have to pow wow with two or three managers to get a decent guess at what the bill is trying to say. It's a definate case of information overload being used to hide the real content from customers.

Re:Employees hate the billing.

[Firethorn]

It's been a joke of mine that it costs the phone companies more to bill you for a phone call than it does for them to provide the phone call.

IE they could charge everybody a flat rate, not have 'detailed billing', charge people less money overall and still make more money than under the current system.

Re:Employees hate the billing.

[failedlogic]

I agree with parent poster.

I've worked for another company in the same industry and friends have worked for their competitors. We all found the respective telco company bills difficult to read - espcecially in the computer systems we were using. Its not always evident - on complex and long bills to find out what's going on. The comptuer system I used was so bad and difficult to read, I eneded up putting customers on hold sometimes, generating a bill in the computer system and printing it out.

So if ever you do call customer service trying to explain your bill, keep in mind many of the industry players have legacy or poorly made billing systems (usually poorly made) and its quite difficult to read.

Re:XO communcations

[jc42]

I once got a bill from my (former)phone company for 0.00 bucks.

Back in the 70s, this was an ongoing joke, often accompanied by details of the bill and the company that did it. A number of the stories had the victim finally giving in and sending a bill for $0.00, which of course the company's accounts people sent through channels (probably with big grins when they realized what the idiot computers had done). Very often, this crashed a number of the computers in the accounting chain.

Typically, when someone investigated, it turned out that the computers were doing all calculations to a few extra decimal places, and the result was a balance less that $0.005 but greater than $0.00, and it was rounded down. The software thus saw a nonzero balance, but displayed it as zero. Why a payment of $0.00 would kill the software was never quite explained, probably out of embarrassment.

It's fun to know that such problems are still with us. But then, the accountants still use a lot of COBOL (and even worse, RPG ;-), so it's not much of a surprise.

I kept waiting for someone to just ignore such bills, to see them eventually go through a collection agency and end up on their credit record. It would be a lot of fun to read about the lawsuit over this. But if this has happened, I haven't ever read about it.