AT&T Sued For Systematic iPhone Overbilling

Hugh Pickens writes writes "UPI reports that AT&T is facing a lawsuit that says AT&T routinely bills for 7 percent to 14 percent more data transactions than normally take place, which could blossom into a costly class-action case. Court papers claim that attorneys set up a test account for an iPhone, then closed all of its apps and left the device unused for 10 days. AT&T still billed the account for 2,292 KB of usage. 'A significant portion of the data revenues were inflated by AT&T's rigged billing system for data transactions,' say court papers filed on behalf of AT&T customer Patrick Hendricks. 'This is like the rigged gas pump charging you when you never even pulled your car into the station.' Attorneys say they would file to have the case moved to class-action status, which makes the outcome relevant to all of AT&T's iPhone accounts."

Comments

Re:AT&T's Fault?

[narcc]

If the user is not interacting with the phone at all, and the user is getting billed purely because of data that the phone is using in the background (not due to user interaction) AT&T should be aware of this.

So... how do you propose that AT&T distinguish user-initiated data from other data?

this phone will generate X bytes of data every N minutes even without user interaction

Oh, I see. You're under the impression that this "background" data is some constant amount. Can you think of no reason that this would be variable?

the fact is the user isn't generating it and so they shouldn't be billed for it.

The user pays for data sent and received. If their phone does 'background' things on the users behalf, why should they get a break? Why force the rest of us to pick up the tab for your data usage because you don't think you should pay for services you use?

Here's an idea: If you have a problem with paying for "background" data, how about you trade your toy phone for a phone that *doesn't* use tons of data in the background?

When this happened with those Windows 7 phones we blamed the *phone*, not the carrier. I guess you apply different standards to Apple. Heaven forbid there could be any problem with the sacred iPhone.