[ NNSquad ] Re: User sues AT&T after $5000+ bill for exceeding 5 GB bandwidth cap

[Sean Bradly <rhythmx@gmail.com>]

For anyone who thinks these charges are not grossly mis-representative, consider this example.

Lets say you actually need 15GB of wireless data. You could pay the overages, or you could sign 3 2yr contracts for 5GB a month. An AT&T data plan is about $60.. so you could get that for $60*12(months)*2(years)*3(plans).  That's $4320 for the entire 2 years.

However, this is what not what AT&T elects to charge you for 15GB/month: ($60+$5000(10GB overage))*12(months)*2(years).  That's $121,440 folks. That's 2800% markup. Thats a 30 year mortgage.

Why doesn't AT&T elect to bill you on the obvious and customer-friendly system of multiple plans? Even a clueless teen working at McDonald's knows that people expect combo prices when you get a burger, fries, and coke. There is nobody that expects a burger, fries, and 3 cokes to cost the same as 28 combos.

Thus, this is obviously more of a punitive charge, in no way related to the cost of service. If they elect to take a punitive measure against you the onus is on them to ensure you understand. All they give you is a notice that you'll be charged 4 one-hundredths of a cent per kilobyte. You could tell most people that to their face and they wouldn't get it. The units and figures are that misleading. What they should be saying is something like "Warning: using double your plan's data will cost $2500 extra". Or how about "$384 per CD's worth of data overage". 

...and don't even get me started how crappy the rates are in the first place, or the SMS markup versus data rates.

--Sean

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 3:19 PM, Lauren Weinstein <lauren@vortex.com> wrote:

User sues AT&T after $5000+ bill for exceeding 5 GB bandwidth cap

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/030309-user-sues-att.html

--Lauren--
NNSquad Moderator

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