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iPhone Bill a Whopping 52 Pages Long

Journal written by PoliTech (998983) and posted by Zonk on Sun Aug 12, 2007 02:28 PM
from the make-the-trees-stop-crying dept.
Handhelds Businesses Media Media (Apple) Communications It's funny. Laugh. Hardware Apple
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."
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Journal: iPhone bill a whopping 52 pages long by PoliTech (998983)
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  • Cingular Billing Systems Are a Mess (Score:5, Informative)

    by smack.addict (116174) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:31PM (#20204817)
    They were never able to get my bill correct for the 6 months I was with them after the initial AT&T merger. I left, went with TMobile for a year, and I am now back as an iPhone customer. I probably should review my bill.

    • Employees hate the billing. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MikeFM (12491) on Sunday August 12 2007, @04:03PM (#20205529) Homepage Journal
      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.

      • Re:Employees hate the billing. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Firethorn (177587) on Sunday August 12 2007, @04:51PM (#20205825) Homepage Journal
        It's been a joke of mine that it costs the phone companies more to bill you for a phone call than it does for them to provide the phone call.

        IE they could charge everybody a flat rate, not have 'detailed billing', charge people less money overall and still make more money than under the current system.

        • Happens in all kinds of industries. (Score:5, Funny)

          by Shag (3737) <dan.birchalls@net> on Sunday August 12 2007, @10:50PM (#20208097) Homepage
          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.

          • Re:Happens in all kinds of industries. (Score:5, Funny)

            by Kahm-Hime (73765) on Monday August 13 2007, @01:35AM (#20208997)
            A friend of mine really disliked his former cellular provider, so when he changed companies he overpaid his last bill by 2 cents. He's received a bill from that company every month for three years now, cheerfully informing him that he has a 2 cent credit.

            I keep telling him that if he ever moves, he should make sure that they receive his change-of-address notification. :)

      • Re:Employees hate the billing. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by failedlogic (627314) on Sunday August 12 2007, @05:04PM (#20205907)
        I agree with parent poster.

        I've worked for another company in the same industry and friends have worked for their competitors. We all found the respective telco company bills difficult to read - espcecially in the computer systems we were using. Its not always evident - on complex and long bills to find out what's going on. The comptuer system I used was so bad and difficult to read, I eneded up putting customers on hold sometimes, generating a bill in the computer system and printing it out.

        So if ever you do call customer service trying to explain your bill, keep in mind many of the industry players have legacy or poorly made billing systems (usually poorly made) and its quite difficult to read.

      • Re:Employees hate the billing. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by GodfatherofSoul (174979) on Sunday August 12 2007, @06:33PM (#20206521)
        That's the whole point. If your bill is a gazillion pages long with obfuscated charges, it makes it easier for phone companies to sneak in extra charges. When you look at your phone bill through that lens (and compare your monthly phone bill to other utilities) it becomes pretty obvious what the game plan is for the industry.
      • This happened to a friend of mine. He sent them a check for $0.00 and it seemed to make the problem go away.

        I got a bill once for $0.22 in college, so I taped a quarter I found on the floor to the bill and sent it in. Since that was the last bill of the year, they sent me mail at home over the summer that I'd over-paid my last phone bill and would receive a check for the difference in a few days. Sure enough, a few days later came a check for $0.03.

        That's not nearly as bad as my credit card company with whom I canceled an account, though. They had a final balance which was an annual fee (the existence of which was why I'd canceled.) So I sent in a check for the balance and canceled the account. Well, some nice lady had apparently removed the annual fee charge, so when the check arrived there, I had a positive balance and they couldn't close the account until it was corrected. So at the beginning of the next billing cycle, their computer automatically cut me a check for the difference, then noted that I hadn't paid the annual fee and added that to my account again... so I was back to my original state with the balance on my card but a check for that amount in my hand. It took me months to get that darn card canceled, and in the meantime when I hadn't paid attention to the fact that it was still open they called me delinquent and the APR went up on all my cards. Sigh.

  • XO communcations (Score:5, Funny)

    by seanadams.com (463190) * on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:33PM (#20204831) Homepage
    Every month for the last six years, I have received a bill from XO communications for -$846.52, for a line that I canceled which had a billing error on the closing statement. I thought about calling them to try to get it fixed, but I figured that would probably take several hours of navigating phone trees and getting transferred from one retarded support rep to the next. Easier to just toss them.

    I also got a refund check one time from PacBell for $0.01.

    • Re:XO communcations (Score:5, Funny)

      by gEvil (beta) (945888) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:39PM (#20204867)
      Holy shit! If you're receiving bills every month for -$846.52 I think you need to sick a collections agency on their ass!

      • Re:XO communcations (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jc42 (318812) on Sunday August 12 2007, @08:17PM (#20207185) Homepage Journal
        I once got a bill from my (former)phone company for 0.00 bucks.

        Back in the 70s, this was an ongoing joke, often accompanied by details of the bill and the company that did it. A number of the stories had the victim finally giving in and sending a bill for $0.00, which of course the company's accounts people sent through channels (probably with big grins when they realized what the idiot computers had done). Very often, this crashed a number of the computers in the accounting chain.

        Typically, when someone investigated, it turned out that the computers were doing all calculations to a few extra decimal places, and the result was a balance less that $0.005 but greater than $0.00, and it was rounded down. The software thus saw a nonzero balance, but displayed it as zero. Why a payment of $0.00 would kill the software was never quite explained, probably out of embarrassment.

        It's fun to know that such problems are still with us. But then, the accountants still use a lot of COBOL (and even worse, RPG ;-), so it's not much of a surprise.

        I kept waiting for someone to just ignore such bills, to see them eventually go through a collection agency and end up on their credit record. It would be a lot of fun to read about the lawsuit over this. But if this has happened, I haven't ever read about it.

  • Paperless billing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PoitNarf (160194) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:34PM (#20204835)
    Now I am extremely happy that I went with their paperless billing option when I signed up for my iPhone.

  • AT&T Billing (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fatman22 (574039) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:38PM (#20204859)
    Somewhere down inside the quagmire that is AT&T's billing system, you'll probably still find an active tariff for leasing crank-style (think "Lassie") phones to customers. It has never been updated to intelligently handle more recent uses of their communications systems, and heaven forbid you should ever ask one of their people to explain a charge or how to lower the cost of your "service". That's one of several reasons I refuse to do business with them anymore.

          • Re:AT&T Billing (Score:5, Informative)

            by DavidTC (10147) <sldfgh.vadiv.vadiv@NospaM.neverbox.com> on Sunday August 12 2007, @06:50PM (#20206645) Homepage

            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.

  • Part of the softening-up process (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:40PM (#20204883) Homepage

    They're preparing you for the day when they start data usage charges. "Unlimited usage" might be just an introductory rate plan. The telcos want to charge you for every download, and clearly they have the billing system in place to do it. You think they went to all the trouble to implement that when it doesn't generate revenue?

  • It's called detailed billing (Score:5, Informative)

    by Wireless Joe (604314) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:41PM (#20204887) Homepage
    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.
        • Surely that could just as easily be attained by a simple summary of data sent/received each month. If a company doesn't trust an employee beyond that it seems to me they probably shouldn't be giving him a business phone at all.

          I certainly doubt that a company would want that information in paper form - for a reasonably sized firm you'd probably need a whole team of people dedicated to just reading and analysing the bills if it was paper rather than a digital, computer-digestable format (and of course what w

  • They want you to know that they know (Score:5, Funny)

    by tzonic (1141125) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:41PM (#20204889)
    Maybe this is a subtle way of saying: yes, we keep track of everything. Your world delivered [to the NSA].

  • AT&T == NSA monitoring (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:43PM (#20204911)
    This level of detail is not only "mind-numbing" in is inconvenience, but should alarm anyone concerned with the privacy of their communications. AT&T has a dismal track record with respect to warrantless governemnt data mining, and it disconcerting that they relay such detailed monitoring for their billing records (even when there is no charge). You can be assured that such records are conveniently feeding the data mining engines at the NSA.

  • The Truth Comes Out (Score:5, Funny)

    by AbsoluteXyro (1048620) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:43PM (#20204913)
    AT&T hates trees.

    • Reminds me of... (Score:5, Funny)

      by ChePibe (882378) on Sunday August 12 2007, @05:29PM (#20206047)
      That reminds me of something a professor of mine used to say.

      He required that all assignments be turned in to him in both paper and PDF format. When asked why, he simply responded: "because I love convenience and hate trees."

      One day I had pink eye and requested to turn it in only via PDF. He responded by saying "my love of convenience outweighs my hatred of the dirty trees. PDF only, you sicko."

  • Hidden charges and "mistakes" (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Matt Perry (793115) on Sunday August 12 2007, @02:45PM (#20204921)
    It'll make it easier to slip in a $1 charge here and a 25 cent charge there. Few people read those bills and making them longer and filled with useless data like this will make it harder to find the signal in the noise.
  • Maybe those were the copies that were supposed to be sent to the NSA...

  • Type of File? Data. (Score:4, Funny)

    by RealGrouchy (943109) on Sunday August 12 2007, @03:03PM (#20205053)

    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.
    Really? On my bill, every single line says "Porn"

    - RG>

  • The data is free (Score:5, Funny)

    by Realistic_Dragon (655151) on Sunday August 12 2007, @03:07PM (#20205079) Homepage
    But the charge you $15/page for the bill!
  • Yep, sign up for Charter FREE UNLIMITED LONG DISTANCE and get an itemized bill of all your long distance and zone calls. I think this is so the marketing drones can pull the run out from under you at some future date and point out HOW MUCH FREE SERVICE you have been getting. It appears that companies just want to keep their options open in-case they decide to eliminate or charge MORE for the FREE UNLIMITED SERVICE.

    Now that we know this, we should have a contest and see who can generate the largest bill.

  • Forward looking (Score:4, Funny)

    by griffjon (14945) <GriffJon@Hotmail. c o m> on Sunday August 12 2007, @03:14PM (#20205145) Homepage Journal
    You see, ATT is preparing a new content delivery system, so soon your bill may include:

    Date - Transfer Method - Type
    08/07/2007 - Data Transfer - Data
    08/07/2007 - Tubes - An Internets
    08/08/2007 - Sneakernet - l33t w4r3zzz
    08/08/2007 - Quantum Entanglement - Welcome Basket of Oranges from The New ATT!

    and so on. So lay off, they're planning for a much wider array of services no doubt, and what seems contentless now will soon have great meaning!
  • Let me quote an AT&T (SBC, so yes, this represents the Cingular side) executive for you on data:

    From the Financial Times [ft.com]:
    "We have to figure out who pays for this bigger and bigger IP network," said Mr Whitacre, who was in New York ahead of AT&T's annual presentation to investors and analysts on Tuesday. "We have to show a return on our investments.?

    "I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network, obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees, but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.". . . . ."They might pass it on to their customers," he says of the fees that he wants to charge the sites.

    How does this apply to wireless, and in particular, the iPhone?

    Simple. A quote from Ed Whitacre's sucessor (Randall Stepheson, or RS: in the following interview) explains that. From Gigaom [gigaom.com] :
    OM: AT&T is a fearsome company now, with a weight of its legacy. Any first day jitters?

    RS: ... The new AT&T is wireless at the core in terms of great new handsets; in terms of enabling true anytime, anywhere mobility that our customers want and in terms of being innovative and service-oriented. If there are any jitters, it's from the excitement running through this company about our prospects.

    OM: There are a lot of challenges facing the company. What do you think is the biggest challenge facing AT&T as a company and you personally?

    RS: Our biggest challenge as a company is to ensure that our customers really understand what the new AT&T is all about. We are the most complete communications and entertainment provider for the way people live-and that starts with wireless. When people recognize that, we win. It's the same on the business side.

    My personal challenge is to make sure that the pieces we've assembled-industry-leading wireless, TV, broadband, global operations and local service work together as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

    OM: How vital is iPhone to your company? I have never seen AT&T push something so hard that wasn't developed internally. Why is that?

    RS: The iPhone is a radically innovative new device and it only makes sense that AT&T and Apple would partner to bring it to market. This device is very important to us, it's important to Apple and it is going to do very well with customers. It also reinforces with consumers that AT&T is the place to turn for the latest in wireless devices and services.

    How do I read this? AT&T feels that content providers (Google, Yahoo, AOL, CBS, etc . . .) should pay for each individual customer's access on a per-usage basis. AT&T also feels that wireless devices are the cornerstone of their future in ALL realms of connectivity, including business and entertainment.

    It only follows naturally that being able to account for *every single packet* a customer uses is part of that billing strategy. You aren't going to be billed by AT&T on that basis; they're going to bill Google et al, and you'll get a bill from the content provider. Let me quote Whitacre again: They might pass it on to their customers," he says of the fees that he wants to charge the sites. .

    Clear as day. If you don't see this coming a mile away, there's something wrong with you.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Space cowboy (13680) *
      Not sure why it's anything to do with *Apple* at all.

      There are apparently some ancient (ie regarding POTS calls) laws about what has to be reported to the customer. AT&T is just obeying the law. If you think it's a stupid law (hint: for datacomms, it is), then sign up for e-billing and save a forest or two...

      Who knows, in some other reality, AT&T might even pass on some savings to you if you do... No postage, no paper costs...

      Simon

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mikesd81 (518581)
      "AT&T decided to do this the paper route instead of just supplying its customers with online, on-demand details."

      Well, first of all they do have paperless billing online. But not everyone has internet connection, or high speed internet, and I tell you from experience, you need broadband to pull one of those bad boys down. Second, I'm not sure I'd want to try to pull all that information via the iPhone given how big the file will be....you're next bill may be a little more pricey.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by the unbeliever (201915)
            Actually, the vast majority of cell phones at retail cost $400-500

            Most providers just subsidize the phone cost into your contract, if you take the sale price.

            "Fair" would be not having to have a contract.

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