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DirecTV Admits Screwing Up Regional Sports Fees, Starts Issuing Credits (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T this week acknowledged that DirecTV has been charging the wrong regional sports fees to some customers and is now issuing bill credits to those who paid more because of the mistake. "We have identified a small percentage of customers who are receiving some inaccurate bills for regional sports network fees," an AT&T spokesperson told Ars yesterday. "We are working as quickly as possible to notify those customers and issue credits. We apologize for the error." AT&T bought DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite TV provider with about 21 million customers, in 2015. The mistake affects bills going back to late January. Customers will not have to do anything to get the credit, as it will be issued automatically. The billing problem came to light last week when Consumerist published a report detailing how the regional sports network fees vary by ZIP code in ways that simply didn't make sense. It wouldn't be surprising to see different fees in different metro areas and states, since different local sports networks and teams are broadcast in different areas. But there were numerous cases in which people in adjacent ZIP codes were charged very different amounts to watch the same exact networks and teams. Some customers were charged no sports fee, while others were charged amounts of $2.47, $5.83, or $7.29 a month.
1) How poorly the word stunned describes how we feel to hear it.
2) What a different outcome there would be if you were a modest-sized sole proprietor and were caught cheating a goodly percentage of your customers.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Pretty much this. It's funny how all the "billing errors" the big corporations are making are always in their favor. I haven't seen a bank error in my favor since I drew that Community Chest card in my childhood but I've seen plenty of errors in the favor of companies I do business with. If DirecTV would just quote a price and say "this is the price you are paying" then they wouldn't have these problems, but since it's in their interest to keep the bill overcomplicated (easier to make "billing errors" that way) it's not going to change unless the government forces their hand.
Enigma