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FCC Will Tackle Cell Phone 'Bill Shock'
MexiCali59 writes "The FCC is expected to launch a proceeding at its Thursday meeting that could force wireless providers to change their billing practices. The agency wants to prevent consumers from unknowingly racking up oversized bills on their phones when they go over their minutes, a situation the agency calls 'bill shock.' The agency released a survey earlier this year that showed one in six American consumers had been surprised by a cell phone bill. The FCC's proposed rules would require carriers to send text or voice alerts before and when minutes are used up. Notifications would also have to accompany out-of-country charges, and carriers would be required to clearly disclose any tools they offer to simplify billing."
I was forced to switch from one of Sprint's discontinued "Family Plans" to an everything plan in order to get a modern phone a few years ago, and now that I've got an even nicer phone that sucks down more data, I wouldn't be surprised if they discontinue this plan too. Maybe the FCC can keep things semi reasonable, instead of letting things get even worse.
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This is such a simple great idea - send a text you've reached your monthly plan limit. No more guessing or having to check.
Or they could get a plan with unlimited texting.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
The Washington Post article has some additional info (but TFA linked in the summary has some the Post missed).
I was a victim of "bill shock", but it was AT&T when they bought out Cingular, not Verizon. My bill had never been over $40 and as soon as AT&T took over, WHAM... $150 bill. I dropped them and got a minute phone. I finally traded that for Boost; no bill shock there, it's a flat $50 per month no matter how much I use it.
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Maybe I am missing something, but why doesn't the FCC go after the roots of some of these problems. For instance, can someone please explain to me why in the hell we are being charged for text messages in the first place? I mean, other than to screw us over and make a pretty penny?
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They're not mandating that you do anything, they're mandating that the carriers (your employer, from the tone of your post) stop stealing from me. RTFA.
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I've had to do this with each of verizon, at&t, and tmobile on one occasion.
Just say you don't want to pay. Say it in person, imply you are going to jump carriers if they do not fix it. Go by during lunch or on a weekend when their store is busiest, and complain loudly enough that the other customers are going to watch them deal with your issue.
They will fix it for you, and they will be very polite and apologetic about the situation to avoid losing potential customers. I have had friends use this technique as well, and so far our attempts have a 100% success rate.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I've had all 3 of the major carriers over the years, and have yet to have easy access to a minutes check feature.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I found one of the better solutions to "Bill Shock". Prepaid phone with unlimited minutes. My bill is my bill, and I can plan for that amount with no confusion.
I was screwed twice by cell phone companies who were out to screw their customers. The first time, I was overcharged $300/mo for "roaming" in a city 100 miles away, even though I never left my city limits during the entire period in question.
The second time, several years later, my phone didn't even work at a house I moved to. I left it sitting on my desk until the battery died, but I still paid the bill normally. Then I started getting overcharged $300 for "roaming". They couldn't demonstrate any calls, or even show any minutes used. I asked them to clarify how I could be roaming if the phone was dead. They couldn't give me any answer but "you need to pay..." But when the phone was working, they were kind enough to nail me with all kinds of fees for International use. Hop over the border, or even be close to it, and they can hit you for it.
Nope, I'm done with that nonsense. No more calls if I'm a day late (and every day after that for months). If my phone gets shut off, it's because I didn't pay the normal fixed amount, and they leave me alone. I *still* get calls 5 years later about a phone I bought as a gift for someone, and my name isn't suppose to even be on the account. No, I'm not paying their phone bill, because it's not my account dammit.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I know for a fact Verizon, as soon as you log in on their website, that is the first thing you see. A nice green bar if you are under, yellow if you are close, red if you are over, they also provide a link to upgrade your account if you think you need too. Very easy to use. Also, if you are on Verizon dial #MIN and you will get a nice text (free of charge) that lists all your usage. I can't speak for other carriers.
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I don't know if the solution to screwing customers out of their money is to force them to spend even more money as "screwing insurance". Why would it be so hard to make going over an "opt-in" instead of the default? Most major carriers won't even give you the option not to go over.
The problem isn't that people sometimes go over, it is that they are charged a ridiculous amount more when they do. I have a USB 3G Modem with a 5 Gig limit which I watched quite carefully. When I knowingly went over just a few hundred megabytes my bill went from $50.00 to $750.00. Now luckily, I was able to convince an upper level rep that I could have rooted my phone and tethered it, but I chose to get the 3G stick to be fair and make sure they received a reasonable amount of compensation for services provided. Until I laid this on them they absolutely were not going to budge at all. I am very much the exception, as obviously the average customer doesn't even understand what I just wrote, so they would have been just straight screwed.
This is of course ridiculous. Now I admit that I could have perused my contract more fully, but my provider has always been quite reasonable so - having a 7 year relationship with them - I trusted that my contract would also be reasonable. Also, bear in mind that most people don't grok the difference between 5 gigabytes and 300 Megabytes, so the whole "people should pay attention to the contract" argument is flatly absurd.
The bottom line? There should definately be a law against charging multiple orders of magnitude more for overages. There is absolutely no reason why they cannot pro-rate the overage at a reasonable increase (say 50%) and they absolutely count on peoples ignorance to jerk them around.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yeah, a website definitely does not qualify as easy, particularly with my non-web-enabled phone. The #MIN thing is closer, though. I suppose I could remember that, or program it on one of my speed dials, then try to remember to check once a day or something. It sure would be nicer if I didn't have to be proactive on yet one more thing in life, though.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
We don't want the government to decide what they can and can't charge. We just want the government to require going over to be something you have to consciously opt in to do.
My carrier won't do it. I asked them if I could block data if I have no data plan, seeing as how they made the default internet button right in the center of my phone (and it sticks out the most). They said no. I suspect most other peoples' carriers won't, either.
So that would be an unlimited plan, priced at $500, right?
Overpriced. Every carrier will sell you an unlimited plan for less.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
When it becomes possible for you to accidentally eat and drink without even knowing you are doing it, they might consider that. If restaurants start making fake carrot sticks indistinguishable from the natural vegetable except that they have 9000 calories each, there WILL be a law about it.
The first comment is, to me, the most interesting response:
Sounds like we're once again legislating to save irresponsible people from their own self-destructive actions.
This response is a dramatic oversimplification of what's going on (sadly, a common occurance). What I believe the FCC is proposing is ensuring that _reasonable_ and _prudent_ laypeople can clearly understand the cost consequences of their actions. And, allowing a customer to set a reasonable price cap on their cell phone spending _increases_ accountability--for costs that match their spending ability.
For example, the cost of your garden variety LOL or ROFL missive sent via text message while roaming in Cancun (phone from Sprint [USA]) was about $1. For some, this can become frighteningly expensive. Given that European pay-as-you-go service carefully tracks (and easily reports to the user via a simple text message) their remaining credits, I fail to see why this reasonable ability isn't available to everyone.
And, as someone who has done disaster relief, I have been surprised by a few increases of $40-50 for roaming charges. I am willing to pay this--but I also desire the ability to know up front. I don't think the end user should have to carry their carrier's Terms and Conditions and rate sheet in their back pocket.
Also, some of these cell phone contracts are ludicrous: even the better ones (I like AT&T) don't do a great job clearly delineating between different types of service (for example, my unlimited SMS messaging plan doesn't include picture messaging). If I, as a person who reads contracts as a part of their job, can accidentally miss this, this circumstance doesn't bode well for an average person who doesn't do this.
Accountability requires reasonable rules and transparency--US cell contracts and bills need some help on this front.
For AT&T, it's *646#. It even came preloaded on my phone.
Neither, I wasn't texting then (still don't except with my daughter) and wasn't talking more. They just changed the way they counted minutes. When it was Cingular, the clock didn't start until you were connected, AT&T started it as soon as you hit the green button. Cingular never rounded minutes, AT&T rounded up.
It's all moot now, my voice, text, internet, email, everything, is all unmetered. I'm also completely anonymous to the phone company; I paid cash for the phone, cash for the connection fee (no contract), pay the bill at a gas station or convenience store with cash.
They text me to inform me that my bill is due a couple of days ahead, and if I go past the due date they text me again and tell me it's shut off. As soon as I pay it, it's right back on right then.
I'm happer with them than any other carrier I've had.
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I was looking for this post because I wanted to make it. :)
I was thinking that a mandatory user-definable bill-cap would a good way to go with this. The default would be set at, oh, 50% more than your no-extra-charges bill. You would have the option of raising your cap permanently or temporarily.
Your phone would just say "You have reached your pre-set spending limit. You must raise this limit before any further additional fee services will be available from this phone."
How hard is that?
Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
How about you do something about the god damned HIDDEN CHARGES.
I'm not talking about overage minutes or text...those are clearly stated in my agreement and I'm on the hook for overages. I'm a big boy and I can pay the bills I agree to.
But SOMEHOW my cell phone bills seem to include over 20% in taxes, fees, surcharges...all that I never agreed to, was never informed of, and are not optional. How about that? How about when advertising service plan rates the cell companies be required to also report how much the government is going to tack on top of it too.
this happened to me on land lines. Being a kid, I knew that I needed to use an area code to call long distance. So I figured that any number that was in my area code was not long distance. So I set about dialing every BBS in my area code. Oops.
Turns out, and I still don't understand why, that quite a few of the numbers I called were not considered local. How was I supposed to know? My dad ended up getting a bill for a couple hundred dollars.
Personally, I don't think the phone company should be allowed to charge anything without an explicit declaration of price and agreement on the part of the customer. Even on POTS. When I dial a number, *any number*, I want to be quoted a rate and given a chance to decline.
These days I just have all long distance calls from my home phone blocked. If I need to make a long distance call, I have a phone card which has a fixed rate per minute, and it tells me how many much time I have left for a call. It's simple math to get back to the per minute rate. Why can't cell phones be as convenient?
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I'd rather see the government mandate a fee against people that make stupid, nonequivalent analogies.
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The main times I've had "bill shock" is times when I had my phone in my pocket, it got unlocked somehow or another, and the button to open up the web browser got accidentally pressed. Then I start racking up data charges without knowing.
So You the customer signed a contract with the cell phone company. You agree to a certain amount of minutes at a certain rate plus additional fees should you go over those minutes. You use your phone. You go over the minutes. But when the cell phone company sends you a bill it's stealing? Don't you have the ability to track the amount of minutes as the month goes by? Even if you don't that's not exactly the cell phone companies fault as you signed up to do business with them.
The customer is also probably the citizen of a democracy of some sort. In such a system, the people can participate in making laws when they feel that some actor -- corporate or natural -- is harming them. The cell phone company knew this when deciding to do business in the country. If enough citizens can demand redress for this grievance through their government, it is their right to. Can the phone company complain about this? Well, sure, but as you pointed out, they voluntarily decided to do business in the country.
I am not a crackpot.
An unfair contract with an oligopoly fucks everyone. If your choices are "get a cell phone" or "don't", you have very limited options for not getting screwed. Free markets don't work when there isn't free competition. That's where the government has to step in to protect the consumer.
Or would you rather have the old days where AT&T owned everyone's phones, which we aren't far from in the mobile space?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Why are the cell phone companies extending customers a near-infinite line of credit on the phone? What exactly makes them think that people are going to PAY a thousand dollar phone bill. It's sheer stupidity, they're sending out ludicrous bills and hoping to make it up on the suckers.
When I signed up for my Sprint plan, they did a credit check and capped my spending at $250. How hard is that? And how hard would it be to ask to have your plan capped to a certain multiple of your usual bill (say, 2x)?
Cell phone companies do NOT operate in a free market. The spectrum rights they are granted amount to legally authorized monopolies. Also, the vast array of towers a company needs in order to have reasonably broad coverage means that not only do cell phone companies have a legal monopoly, their market niche is also a natural monopoly.
Monopolies are one of the common reasons for capitalism/the market failing. The only way we know to patch this hole in our economic system is to have the government make rules and enforce them.
Anyhow, for this reason, in order to stop the cell phone companies legally scamming us by charging us ridiculous rates for overages and not telling us until the end of the month, they need to mandate notifications when our bill goes over.
I think notifications aren't enough : I think a user should be able to set a maximum dollar cap for a month of service, and if the bill goes over that the cell phone company must either get the user to agree to lift the cap or to cut off service until the end of the month. (except for emergency calls or calls on night/weekend minutes, etc)
I could understand advertising $39.95/mo exclusive of taxes, but the phone companies themselves tack on a bunch of other surcharges that are _not_ taxes. They make them sound like taxes by calling them "regulatory recovery fees", but they're really unadvertised price hikes that they can spring on you at will, even when you have a contractual price.
Make phone companies advertise their ACTUAL rate first. Then go after these warnings...
(It's for this reason I use a prepaid Tracfone; no surprises.)
Yes, because it's going to take up sooooooooooooooooooooo much time, and soooooooooooooooo much effort, and sooooooooooooooooooooooooo much equipment to send a single fucking text message when a condition within an If statement is reached.
How does my bank ever manage to text me when my accounts reach certain thresholds without bankrupting themselves? It's goddamned fucking miracle, I tells you.
Sometimes this excessive billing happens retroactively, making it impossible for the customer to keep track of charges or receive notification of reaching limits. I recently added a global data plan (at a rate of about $1 per day over my regular data plan) for an overseas trip and was shocked to see a $130 data charge that didn't show up until a couple of weeks after the trip. I had told the carrier beforehand the days on which I would need the global data plan (with an extra day on either end of the trip just in case), thinking that they would set it up to be active on those days. In reality, they just left the service on until well after I had returned, then retroactively changed my plan back to my regular data plan for the days I hadn't requested it. And a couple that I had. In order to save me a couple of dollars, they stuck me with $130 in data charges. Luckily, they fixed it without much trouble, but it shouldn't have gotten this far. These plan changes had to be made over the phone with no written confirmation of what had been requested and what was to be provided and no notification of the retroactive changes was given until it showed up on my bill (which was a tangled mess of charges and refunds). But hey, they might have lucked out and gotten an extra $130 for their incompetence.
Have you noticed that most of the cheaper non-smart phones have a prominent button for "marketplace" or some such WAP service? Just hitting it accidentally can double your bill if you don't have a data plan. (And if you have a cheap flipper, you probably don't have or need a data plan.) This button is usually the only one that can not be remapped or disabled. It is essentially a "PROFIT" button for the carrier.
We bought the unlimited data plan and unlimited texting plan for our daughter's first cell phone on the theory that just one mistake could be many times more expensive than the cost of the plan. We went a long time without surprises, and then one day I got a bill that was an appreciable fraction of a grand. Turns out the carrier had some kind of "ask a question via text" feature, daughter had discovered it, and was using it to help with homework. Had I known, I would have researched it, found how much it cost per question, and shut it down. But the billing cycle is such that you don't know you're in trouble until you're in LOTS of trouble, and I'm certain this is intentional also.
I argued with the carrier for a very long time, going up the chain of command (or just sideways -- you never can tell) and eventually found someone who cared that I was going to take four phones to a competing carrier unless they addressed this. They offered a 50% reduction in the bill and I gritted my teeth and took it. And also made very sure that I was aware of all such "services" and had them all locked out.
The great rank and file -- whom I like to call "Fred and Ethyl", would not know about this stuff until they're nailed by it. Even people who are being careful -- my case -- can still get nailed by "services" of which they are unaware. This goes way beyond disallowing Google Maps on a smartphone so you can charge someone ten bucks a month for the carrier's app. This is like buying a car with Onstar built in and then finding out that it's free to call a red and white ambulance but there's a $10,000 charge if the ambulance is blue and white. It's an arbitrary "gotcha" designed to generate windfalls for the carrier.
To a certain extent, they all do it, but some are worse than others.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
And then, under the graphic that purports to show the same data, it tries to bamboozle you with phrases like:
and
This is the kind of shit we shouldn't stand for.
And you sum up what's wrong with this nation. Retards who think anyone with compassion is lazy and nonsensical, and that democracy fails when their preferred leaders aren't in charge.
This is not a "protect people from themselves" issue. Things are purposely set up to maximize the possibility of you unintentionally racking up charges. A "Web" button that can't be disabled right next to the "Call" button. Smartphones that "phone home" over the data line even when data is disabled while traveling internationally. Huge, punishing charges if you go over your limit even by a tiny bit. (I mean seriously, if $40 a month will cover several gigabytes of downloads, why charge over $80 for 2.2 Megabytes of downloads without a data plan? Answer: Because they can.) Phone bills that lag 45 days or more behind your actual usage. "Services" that have a per-usage charge that isn't spelled out when you use them. (Teens typically fall for this.) The carrier not clearly communicating that you can turn a lot (but not all) of these "services" off by a simple request.
It's not just a matter of reading and understanding the TOS. We're all professionals here, we can really dig into a TOS and find the line buried on page 3 in the middle of paragraph six dealing with FCC regulations where they've buried the over usage fees. That doesn't cover everything -- there's ways to overinflate your bill that aren't covered by the TOS.
Mind you, my nephew was a fine counterexample. He was told that local calls on the weekends were free, and he thought he heard that all local calls were free. His first bill was the size of a paperback and well over a grand. To my knowledge the carrier is still looking for him. No matter how foolproof one makes a system, fools will find a way to crash land. But besides that, the system as it currently stands is designed to blow your hand off if you turn the knob to the left instead of the right, and that's the part that really needs to stop.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It has nothing to do with charity. Medical Insurance isn't really about insurance as it is currently treated by *all* parties. Insurance would be against something catastrophic not regular. You don't turn in oil changes, new tires, and gasoline on your car insurance.
Medical insurance as it currently stands is effectively a price negotiation pool, along with group acclamation of costs. Trying to pretend it is anything else is disingenuous at best.
And trying to go without insurance under the current system is just foolish, not just due to the potential of huge costs due to risk, but also simply the issue of price offloading to those that don't have the negotiating power to fight it.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
I know - it's fucking horrible. Like AT&T for example, their interface to do this is a disaster. I have to go to "www.att.com/myWireless", off a button on the front page of AT&T's site, no less, then, get this, they ask for my cell number and a password. Once I enter that in, it's this onerous, convoluted situation where I am forced to let my eyes wander roughly four inches from the top of the page to this tiny graphic that occupies, hmmm, no more than a third of the page width
Again, if you read about this subject you'll see examples of people who HAD NO INTERNET ACCESS because they were volunteering to rebuild Haiti. So they couldn't check your precious website. And they were told their cell service would be comped because they were volunteering. But Verizon didn't comp texts and data so the cell user received a $45,000 bill.
So go ahead, get snarky again about that example of "bill shock".
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007