From TelecomWeb News, August 17, 2007
The first flock of iPhone fanatics have gotten their first bills this week — some of them 300 pages long and delivered in a box, others for $3,000 or more. AT&T’s customers are not amused.
Dramatizing the situation better than most has been a video on YouTube posted by graphic designer and blogger Justine Ezarik. In it, the attractive young woman goes through all 300 pages of her bill while the music used in iPhone commercials plays in the background. As of TelecomWeb news break’s posting time, her video had been played 140,905 times in fewer than 48 hours — and that was just for the version Ezarik herself posted on YouTube. Others had re-posted the video, and the video is also on other sites, including Ezarik’s own blog site.
“I got my first AT&T bill, right here,” Ezarik says on the video, “in a box.” (The video is on her blog, http://www.tastyblogsnack.com, for anyone who wants to watch it.)
What’s apparently happened is easily explainable. AT&T uses a separate billing line for each phone call, each data transmission, each text message — even if there’s no charge for them, like on an unlimited plan or where the service falls within the allotted quotas of a user’s service plan. And with the iPhone, the flow of data bits back and forth is constant with many applications, triggering lines by the hundred.
Ezarik, admittedly, does lots of data-intensive things with her iPhone. “Texting and e-mail is my main form of communication, and I know I’m not alone. Why call when you can text?” she asks.
As it turns out, Ezarik and what now looks to be thousands of others, based on the flow of chatter around the blogosphere, didn’t think of signing up for electronic billing when they got their iPhones, an option offered by AT&T that would eliminated the pile of paper. “Sign up for e-billing! Stop the madness!,” Ezarik now recommends. AT&T also offers a condensed billing option.
So far, though, there’s been no explanation of why the salesmen busily ringing up $500 iPhone sales hadn’t been briefed on the billing situation, in order to recommend e-bills to users.
As for the enormous iPhone bills — those are apparently due to data charges for overseas roaming. The all-you-can eat data plans, it seems, don’t cover the iPhone when roaming overseas. AT&T apparently charges $19.97 per megabyte, billed at the rate of $0.0195 per kilobyte. According to complaints reported on a series of blog sites, one hapless user was billed $3,000 for his use of an iPhone for two weeks on a trip to the U.K.; another reported $5,086.66 in charges. AT&T allegedly has an $300 annual international data plan for iPhone, with a 20MB-a-month limit, but the users neither knew about it nor had any idea they would be charged a fortune for what was a relatively small amount of data.
Finally, word is spreading, warning iPhone users who travel outside of the United States to turn off a feature called “eMail autocheck.” It seems the automatic download of PDF spam has been hitting some road warriors in the pocketbook, to the tune of almost $100 in extra charges for a brief trip abroad.
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