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AT&T Overcharge iPhone And iPad Customers
“Lawyers working on the case say Independent investigators working on their behalf have found consistent and systematic differences between the amounts AT&T bills for mobile data usage and the actual incidence of data application usage by subscribers.
One of the attorney’s pursuing the case says, “Independent investigators found that AT&T overcharged on every single mobile data transaction they investigated. There was never even a single incidence where a discrepancy worked to the benefit of a customer. It was always an overcharge, never an undercharge.”
It seems that one of the tests that was conducted included buying an iPhone from AT&T along with data services, disabling all things that might trigger data usage and locking it in a drawer for 10 days. The results are rather shocking as it seems that when the bill arrived, they were found to have been charged for 35 transactions involving data. In a response by AT&T,
“We properly charge for all data that our customers send and receive, including data activity that runs in the background on smartphones and other powerful data devices. Accurate billing is clearly important and, unfortunately, there have been some incorrect claims about our data usage billing practices. Particularly for smartphones, tablets and other advanced mobile devices, applications are often constantly running in the background and engaged with our network. And AT&T captures your data activity nightly to create a bill record in our systems. This will appear on your bill to be a late night ‘charge,’ but in fact, the time stamp reflects the time that your device established a connection to the network, not the time that you sent or received data.”
Granted there are two sides to the coin, some might say that you should be blaming Apple instead since this problem seems to be limited to the iPhones and iPads who could be sending data unnecessarily. One could also blame users for not fully closing their apps and allowing them to run in the background, thus generating unnecessary data usage. So what do you think? Are you an affected customer too?