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AT&T's Metered Billing Off By Up To 4,700%
jfruhlinger writes "Metered billing for home Internet service may be the way of the future. But shouldn't we have the right to expect that the meters will at least be accurate? As AT&T moves its DSL and fiber customers to plans where they'll have to pay for overages, some users have noticed that the company's assessment of how much data is being used can be wildly inaccurate."
The more and more these internet providers try to screw their customers, whether purposefully or inadvertently, the more we move to making broadband a public utility. If companies can't act responsibly, the only other option, in this semi-monopoly, is to get the feds involved.
It ends up being a power grab, much like the old days were. That, and it has a not-so-nice way of killing innovation.
The issue is largely one of accountability. For example, I have electric and natural gas service at my house. There are meters out back: they're built to government standards, are quite reliable and generally track my usage very well. Occasionally, I get a bill in the mail that has some outrageous numbers on it (I once got an electric bill for some three thousand dollars one month.) Usually that's because the meter reader mistyped something into his computer, or because of some issue with their billing system. Regardless, I still have the meter itself to fall back on, and I can call up the utility and either request a new reading or just give it to them over the phone and have the bill corrected. When I got that big bill, I was asked to go take a manual reading, and to just "tear up that bill, will send you a new one. Sorry for the inconvenience." No problem.
That's not what's going to happen here: AT&T is expecting people to just accept whatever usage they decide to bill for, with no recourse whatsoever if it turns out that they're wrong. And this will happen, with monotonous regularity, and most people will just pay because they have no idea what a gigabyte is, and how it relates to what they actually do with their computer online, and because Internet access is becoming less and less of a disposable luxury for millions of people.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Isn't billing based on inaccurate weights and measures fraud?
It should have its incorporation revoked and all top executives and board members barred from ever being in the telecom business again.
These are the same players from the time when the first break up occurred. They did not learn their lesson about abusing their position, building monopoly and being bad for the consumer. They had their chance to straighten up and fly right. They can't be trusted to behave.
No they're not. SBC bought the old AT&T, and kept the name AT&T. What you have are the people who operated the worst of the original thirteen Baby Bells now running the show. Which is, I agree, not an improvement. Also, whatever you want to say about the old AT&T, remember that they operated under some very strict regulation, and did provide us, for a very long time, with about the best phone service in the world. Much of the problem we have now is that none of the big ISPs operate under any real regulation anymore, no real service standards apply: they can do pretty much whatever they want with little if any penalty.
But yeah, I think that most of the big players ought to be up on anti-trust charges at some point. What they're doing is not in the consumers' interest at any level.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
No, percentages are not misleading. There may be a significantly different *dollar amount* in your example, and you might be able to absorb a $4.79 loss (if you even notice it,) but but you're still being ripped off by 4700%.
Having it as absolute figures might get a handful of individuals to get their bill corrected, but $4.79 multiplied by how many tens of thousands of customers every month adds up to how much in ill-gotten and possibly systematic gains?
If were all ripped off a little at a time, it's not as big of a deal?
The issue is largely one of accountability. For example, I have electric and natural gas service at my house. There are meters out back: they're built to government standards, are quite reliable and generally track my usage very well.
The difference is that when you use more natural gas, the gas company has to buy more natural gas. When you use more electricity, the power company has to put more coal in their furnaces. When you use more bandwidth, unless the network was already at 100% capacity, it costs the ISP nothing and the capacity you would consume would otherwise go to waste. If the network is at 100% capacity then it needs to be expanded whether there is metered billing or not. That is, unless you set the metered rate so high that it will materially suppress usage -- also known as "destroying innovation" -- in which case everyone will get less service for more money since you're now paying extra usage fees but the ISP no longer needs to expand capacity because metered billing is suppressing usage, so all the extra money goes to profit.
Metered billing is the model of perpetual stagnation. It gives the ISP an incentive to never upgrade because the more scarcity there is, the more they can charge for it. Why on Earth would they make a capital investment to alleviate a supply shortfall, the result of which would be lower prices to customers? They certainly have no real competition to make them do it.