How AT&T and T-Mobile may be overbilling their prepaid customers
By Brian Fung, WashPost, Updated: March 14 at 7:40 am
Federal regulators may have approved AT&T's bid on Thursday to merge with California-based Leap Wireless, a.k.a. Cricket — a deal that will add 5 million customers to AT&T's rolls. But fans of Cricket's service may have a reason to be wary of their new corporate overlords.
That's because prepaid customers on AT&T are routinely being billed extra for minutes they don't appear to be using. If true, that means their available credit is being drained at unexpected rates — often without their knowledge — requiring that they buy more credit, more often. Critics allege the practice amounts to a subtle program of consumer fraud that, in the aggregate, delivers big bucks to wireless carriers.
According to the Switch's hardware tests, as well as a formal complaint lodged with federal regulators, wireless companies are reporting longer call times than what a customer's device will show. In the case of one AT&T subscriber, the network added as many as 33 seconds to his call after he hung up, allowing AT&T to bill him for an additional minute of usage. The Switch's tests also turned up a similar phenomenon with T-Mobile's prepaid phones.
Wireless operators generally charge customers a full minute's worth of airtime for every fraction of a minute used. That's uncontroversial. For example, a call that lasts for 1 minute and 10 seconds will be treated as 2 minutes. But it now appears that even calls that end before a minute is up are also getting treated as two-minute calls. Device testing shows the same holds true no matter how long you talk. One call that I made using an AT&T Go Phone should have been billed at two minutes. Instead, the account was charged for three.
(More here.)
Federal regulators may have approved AT&T's bid on Thursday to merge with California-based Leap Wireless, a.k.a. Cricket — a deal that will add 5 million customers to AT&T's rolls. But fans of Cricket's service may have a reason to be wary of their new corporate overlords.
That's because prepaid customers on AT&T are routinely being billed extra for minutes they don't appear to be using. If true, that means their available credit is being drained at unexpected rates — often without their knowledge — requiring that they buy more credit, more often. Critics allege the practice amounts to a subtle program of consumer fraud that, in the aggregate, delivers big bucks to wireless carriers.
According to the Switch's hardware tests, as well as a formal complaint lodged with federal regulators, wireless companies are reporting longer call times than what a customer's device will show. In the case of one AT&T subscriber, the network added as many as 33 seconds to his call after he hung up, allowing AT&T to bill him for an additional minute of usage. The Switch's tests also turned up a similar phenomenon with T-Mobile's prepaid phones.
Wireless operators generally charge customers a full minute's worth of airtime for every fraction of a minute used. That's uncontroversial. For example, a call that lasts for 1 minute and 10 seconds will be treated as 2 minutes. But it now appears that even calls that end before a minute is up are also getting treated as two-minute calls. Device testing shows the same holds true no matter how long you talk. One call that I made using an AT&T Go Phone should have been billed at two minutes. Instead, the account was charged for three.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home