Slashdot Mirror
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."
Holy shit! If you're receiving bills every month for -$846.52 I think you need to sick a collections agency on their ass!
This guy's the limit!
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].
But who'll be laughing when they have years worth of paper for the fireplace to see out the nuclear winter!
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!
AT&T hates trees.
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.
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.
But the charge you $15/page for the bill!
Beep beep.
Somehow, in the event of global thermonuclear war, I don't think anybody'll be wishing there was more fire.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
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."
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
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
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.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
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.