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

Cingular Billing Systems Are a Mess

[smack.addict]

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.

Re:Cingular Billing Systems Are a Mess

[samkass]

This happened to a friend of mine. He sent them a check for $0.00 and it seemed to make the problem go away.

I got a bill once for $0.22 in college, so I taped a quarter I found on the floor to the bill and sent it in. Since that was the last bill of the year, they sent me mail at home over the summer that I'd over-paid my last phone bill and would receive a check for the difference in a few days. Sure enough, a few days later came a check for $0.03.

That's not nearly as bad as my credit card company with whom I canceled an account, though. They had a final balance which was an annual fee (the existence of which was why I'd canceled.) So I sent in a check for the balance and canceled the account. Well, some nice lady had apparently removed the annual fee charge, so when the check arrived there, I had a positive balance and they couldn't close the account until it was corrected. So at the beginning of the next billing cycle, their computer automatically cut me a check for the difference, then noted that I hadn't paid the annual fee and added that to my account again... so I was back to my original state with the balance on my card but a check for that amount in my hand. It took me months to get that darn card canceled, and in the meantime when I hadn't paid attention to the fact that it was still open they called me delinquent and the APR went up on all my cards. Sigh.

XO communcations

[seanadams.com]

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.

Re:XO communcations

[gEvil (beta)]

Holy shit! If you're receiving bills every month for -$846.52 I think you need to sick a collections agency on their ass!

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.

Paperless billing

[PoitNarf]

Now I am extremely happy that I went with their paperless billing option when I signed up for my iPhone.

Re:Paperless billing

[sholden]

But who'll be laughing when they have years worth of paper for the fireplace to see out the nuclear winter!

Re:Paperless billing

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy: just log into your provider from your iPhone, COPY the personal code it'll give you and PASTE it over the page requesting authentication. BTW: you will need to leave a VOICE RECORDING of agreement, just for legal purporses.

Re:Paperless billing

[jb.hl.com]

Somehow, in the event of global thermonuclear war, I don't think anybody'll be wishing there was more fire.

Re:Paperless billing

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

You and I define "easy" differently.

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.

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.

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:Part of the softening-up process

[Belacgod]

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

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.

They want you to know that they know

[tzonic]

Maybe this is a subtle way of saying: yes, we keep track of everything. Your world delivered [to the NSA].

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.

AT&T == NSA monitoring

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Truth Comes Out

[AbsoluteXyro]

AT&T hates trees.

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.

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

[tomhudson]

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.

Type of File? Data.

[RealGrouchy]

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. Really? On my bill, every single line says "Porn"

- RG>

The data is free

[Realistic_Dragon]

But the charge you $15/page for the bill!

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:Someone got $3000 bill for using iPhone in Euro

[tomhudson]

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 :-)

Re:'Kansas City Shuffle'..

[Tom9729]

  Joke==>
        0
       -|-
       / \
       You

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:Someone got $3000 bill for using iPhone in Euro

[edittard]

I've seen php scripts that end up #including almost 100 other scripts ON EVERY PAGE LOAD!!!
This is insane.

I agree, nobody in their right mind uses PHP.

Reminds me of...

[ChePibe]

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."

Happens in all kinds of industries.

[Shag]

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.

Re:Happens in all kinds of industries.

[Kahm-Hime]

A friend of mine really disliked his former cellular provider, so when he changed companies he overpaid his last bill by 2 cents. He's received a bill from that company every month for three years now, cheerfully informing him that he has a 2 cent credit.

I keep telling him that if he ever moves, he should make sure that they receive his change-of-address notification. :)