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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."
They were never able to get my bill correct for the 6 months I was with them after the initial AT&T merger. I left, went with TMobile for a year, and I am now back as an iPhone customer. I probably should review my bill.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/31/att_iphone_in tl_roam.html
Every month for the last six years, I have received a bill from XO communications for -$846.52, for a line that I canceled which had a billing error on the closing statement. I thought about calling them to try to get it fixed, but I figured that would probably take several hours of navigating phone trees and getting transferred from one retarded support rep to the next. Easier to just toss them.
I also got a refund check one time from PacBell for $0.01.
Now I am extremely happy that I went with their paperless billing option when I signed up for my iPhone.
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
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.
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?
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.
Maybe this is a subtle way of saying: yes, we keep track of everything. Your world delivered [to the NSA].
My cingular bill has been like this for ages, every single transaction listed without regard for charges. I finally convinced myself that too much information is better than too little.
loyalty above all, save honor
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.
This guy's the limit!
This level of detail is not only "mind-numbing" in is inconvenience, but should alarm anyone concerned with the privacy of their communications. AT&T has a dismal track record with respect to warrantless governemnt data mining, and it disconcerting that they relay such detailed monitoring for their billing records (even when there is no charge). You can be assured that such records are conveniently feeding the data mining engines at the NSA.
AT&T hates trees.
It'll make it easier to slip in a $1 charge here and a 25 cent charge there. Few people read those bills and making them longer and filled with useless data like this will make it harder to find the signal in the noise.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Not sure why it's anything to do with *Apple* at all.
There are apparently some ancient (ie regarding POTS calls) laws about what has to be reported to the customer. AT&T is just obeying the law. If you think it's a stupid law (hint: for datacomms, it is), then sign up for e-billing and save a forest or two...
Who knows, in some other reality, AT&T might even pass on some savings to you if you do... No postage, no paper costs...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
This issue has little to do with the iPhone and much to do with AT&T Mobility/Cingular Wireless' odd record keeping. My BlackBerry service also generates a massive bill -- length, not cost -- every month. Nothing new here, folks.
I'm not popular enough to be different.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons
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.
Maybe those were the copies that were supposed to be sent to the NSA...
Web pages are getting ridiculously heavy, thanks to high-speed internet and people feeling that they don't have to optimize - "it takes away from the experience."
The same can be said for server loads - page generation is going backwards in terms of cpu usage. I've seen php scripts that end up #including almost 100 other scripts ON EVERY PAGE LOAD!!!
This is insane.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
"AT&T decided to do this the paper route instead of just supplying its customers with online, on-demand details."
Well, first of all they do have paperless billing online. But not everyone has internet connection, or high speed internet, and I tell you from experience, you need broadband to pull one of those bad boys down. Second, I'm not sure I'd want to try to pull all that information via the iPhone given how big the file will be....you're next bill may be a little more pricey.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
But the charge you $15/page for the bill!
Beep beep.
Yep, sign up for Charter FREE UNLIMITED LONG DISTANCE and get an itemized bill of all your long distance and zone calls. I think this is so the marketing drones can pull the run out from under you at some future date and point out HOW MUCH FREE SERVICE you have been getting. It appears that companies just want to keep their options open in-case they decide to eliminate or charge MORE for the FREE UNLIMITED SERVICE.
Now that we know this, we should have a contest and see who can generate the largest bill.
I'm surprised they haven't added a "paper and/or postage surcharge" for a 50+ page bill. I know it requires extra postage, but can one even mail a 50 page document using a standard envelope?
Considering how much the environmental activists pressured Apple to use "greener" manufacturing and packaging, I'm a little surprised they're not taking Apple & the carrier to task for this remarkable waste of paper. I would think there's as much material in one 50-page bill as the iPhone packaging! One or two bills therefore completely undoes any of the efforts to make the product packaging more efficient. Penny wise, pound foolish, as they say.
You see, ATT is preparing a new content delivery system, so soon your bill may include:
Date - Transfer Method - Type
08/07/2007 - Data Transfer - Data
08/07/2007 - Tubes - An Internets
08/08/2007 - Sneakernet - l33t w4r3zzz
08/08/2007 - Quantum Entanglement - Welcome Basket of Oranges from The New ATT!
and so on. So lay off, they're planning for a much wider array of services no doubt, and what seems contentless now will soon have great meaning!
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
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."
Actually, the vast majority of cell phones at retail cost $400-500
Most providers just subsidize the phone cost into your contract, if you take the sale price.
"Fair" would be not having to have a contract.
Web pages are getting ridiculously heavy, thanks to high-speed internet and people feeling that they don't have to optimize...
Actually it's because they're so heavily laden with advertising. Blocking the ads speeds things up considerably. In fact, when possible, I block everything that's not on the page I'm visiting. I don't know if there's a hosts file on the iPhone to edit.
What?
If you really want to get anal, mb is not megabits, it would be millibits (which doesn't make much sense, but hey). The mega prefix is always a capital M.
I *was* going to include MB for megabytes, just to get all the case modders going "Its MotherBoard, you f%@#tard!", but its not Tuesday :-)
Joke==>
0
-|-
/ \
You
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.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
At the bottom of the
I'm amazed and a bit shocked that there are so many people here who think that paperless billing is an acceptable idea. It isn't, because:
1) It can be manipulated after the fact. "What were you suing us for? Look at your online bill, it says nothing about the 4-hour-call to Farkistan you claim we've wrongfully charged you for."
2) You can't prove the manipulation. "That so-called 'print' you have, it's trivial to fake out *anything*. Anybody can save an online bill to his local computer and change anything to his liking, and print it."
3) Sooner or later (usually sooner), the telco fucks up your billing. It's inevitable. And when trouble strikes, with a paper bill you have nice physical proof of their fuckup, nicely delivered in a dated envelope, printed with their type of toner on their business letter sheets.
Here in Germany, the telcos tend to default to online billing and you have to pay for paper bills. I gladly do, because of all the above. I've yet to encounter a telco or ISP that *never* fucks up billing.
(They're usually fighting with legacy billing systems which don't scale so well with the flood of clients they get as monopolization continues. That's a dragon that's *very* difficult to slay, because you can't just halt the system to migrate it, and you must make sure that it supports all existing business processes. The last thing alone can even give very experienced integrators sleepless nights and lots of headaches. I think it's just the natural result of growing complexity in business processes. It's your call whether you blame them for it or just shrug it off. I do the latter.)
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
Here :
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/39486
Just put any coffee cups etc you are holding away before reading.
Read radical news here
That's why you surf the lighter-weight versions of pages: http://slashdot.org/palm/ gives a front page that weighs only 8 KB.
... providing I didn't get an itemized bill of the time I wasted, of course.
Wow. I've been dealing with oversized, CPU-intensive sites the entire morning. My headache just disappeared.
Seriously, I had no idea that existed. Now if I could read Slashdot in mutt (properly threaded, of course), my life would be complete. Hell, I'd pony up a fat subscription fee for such a service
You don't get the "rebate" unless you sign up for the contract.
Buy a phone without a contract, you pay the MSRP.
That reminds me of something a professor of mine used to say.
He required that all assignments be turned in to him in both paper and PDF format. When asked why, he simply responded: "because I love convenience and hate trees."
One day I had pink eye and requested to turn it in only via PDF. He responded by saying "my love of convenience outweighs my hatred of the dirty trees. PDF only, you sicko."
... but just look at the industrial design of the bill ... the shapes and curves and subtle accents ... it's gorgeous
Depends on what you consider is a website ;) The average myspace website is about 5-10mb ;)
Let me quote an AT&T (SBC, so yes, this represents the Cingular side) executive for you on data:
."They might pass it on to their customers," he says of the fees that he wants to charge the sites.
... The new AT&T is wireless at the core in terms of great new handsets; in terms of enabling true anytime, anywhere mobility that our customers want and in terms of being innovative and service-oriented. If there are any jitters, it's from the excitement running through this company about our prospects.
.) should pay for each individual customer's access on a per-usage basis. AT&T also feels that wireless devices are the cornerstone of their future in ALL realms of connectivity, including business and entertainment.
From the Financial Times:
"We have to figure out who pays for this bigger and bigger IP network," said Mr Whitacre, who was in New York ahead of AT&T's annual presentation to investors and analysts on Tuesday. "We have to show a return on our investments.?
"I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network, obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees, but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.". . . .
How does this apply to wireless, and in particular, the iPhone?
Simple. A quote from Ed Whitacre's sucessor (Randall Stepheson, or RS: in the following interview) explains that. From Gigaom :
OM: AT&T is a fearsome company now, with a weight of its legacy. Any first day jitters?
RS:
OM: There are a lot of challenges facing the company. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing AT&T as a company and you personally?
RS: Our biggest challenge as a company is to ensure that our customers really understand what the new AT&T is all about. We are the most complete communications and entertainment provider for the way people live-and that starts with wireless. When people recognize that, we win. It's the same on the business side.
My personal challenge is to make sure that the pieces we've assembled-industry-leading wireless, TV, broadband, global operations and local service work together as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
OM: How vital is iPhone to your company? I have never seen AT&T push something so hard that wasn't developed internally. Why is that?
RS: The iPhone is a radically innovative new device and it only makes sense that AT&T and Apple would partner to bring it to market. This device is very important to us, it's important to Apple and it is going to do very well with customers. It also reinforces with consumers that AT&T is the place to turn for the latest in wireless devices and services.
How do I read this? AT&T feels that content providers (Google, Yahoo, AOL, CBS, etc . .
It only follows naturally that being able to account for *every single packet* a customer uses is part of that billing strategy. You aren't going to be billed by AT&T on that basis; they're going to bill Google et al, and you'll get a bill from the content provider. Let me quote Whitacre again: They might pass it on to their customers," he says of the fees that he wants to charge the sites. .
Clear as day. If you don't see this coming a mile away, there's something wrong with you.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Try w3m, it supports tables, mouse, etc.
Because the php scripts are written by a C programmer. I spend at least 10% of my time at work trying to explain to compiled language programmers how to write in a scripted language. They are simply used to include everything and the kitchen sink and rely on compiler to sort it out.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
5 milibits seems a little small, doesn't it?
I had a 401(k) somewhere. I don't remember which investment company it was with, or what former employer of mine it correlated to, or anything. Anyway, I rolled it into an IRA I had, along with some other old accounts. It went well - except for the investment company leaving a balance of about $0.11 in the 401(k) account.
They now spend about $0.75 every quarter to mail me a thick statement telling me whether my balance has fallen to $0.10, risen to $0.12, or whatever.
I realize that informing them would be the merciful thing to do, but my sense of ethics isn't that overdeveloped, so I let nature take its course.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
But if you are a regulated monopoly that gets to charge operating costs + 10%, isn't it is your best interest to maximize your operating costs?
Now admittedly, wireless is probably the most competitive of all the data services (easiest to switch vendors, you actually have more than one vendor to choose from (well, not for iPhone users)). But my point is that these aren't new corporations with new ways of thinking. They are still old fashioned corporations where CYA is more important than customer service. Will they change to a shorter form? Of course they will. But it won't be because the director of billing information systems told his people "If it's what is best for the customer, do it!" It will be because the customers complained to the customer service reps, who told their supervisors, who scheduled a cross-business-line-meeting, who will tell the billing information systems manager what screw-up he is. And he will whine that if they didn't print out every freaking line item, then he wouldn't have been allowed to cover his ass with the customer bills.
Besides, when the bean-counters come snooping around looking for ways to cut costs, the billing information systems manager will get to propose emailing the bill, and then shift the work to the CSRs to convince the customers to sign up. If cost's aren't going down, it's because the CSRs aren't selling it enough. Meanwhile, billing information systems manager gets a bigger part of the company budget than he would have otherwise. By costing more, his department is worth more to the company.
In a truly free market, this would be financial suicide. But due to origins of telecom, these aren't really free-market companies (or at least they don't think like them yet).
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I've often considered starting a project to make OCR systems that would be able to read the bills of common vendors for cellular service, etc. It would work best if you had a feed-style scanner (as opposed to a flatbed where you would have to insert each page once per side... not fun with 52 pages), but it could look for inconsistencies like:
- Billing during your non-billable minutes (e.g. free evenings/weekends)
- Billing on incoming calls (for those with free incoming)
- Billing on calls from others on the same carrier (for those with free companycompany calling: you would need to input which friends use the same telco)
- Incorrect tabulation of minutes/costs
- Billing long-distance on calls made in-area
As well as just highlighting suspicious charges.
I recently had an issue with my cellular carrier. They happily send me a bill showing the minutes I'm being charged for (aka in excess of my 150 weekday/1000 evening/weekend+free incoming+free in-carrier calling), but they do NOT send me an accounting of the calls that used up the minutes in my plan. That means that I'm forced to trust their honesty in tabulating when my initial minutes are used up. *yeah right*
I'm got a new bill coming in the mail, this one describing when and where the minutes of my plan were used up... it'll be interesting to see if there are any discrepancies.