AT&T Continues to Prove Its Incompetence
Everyone knows that the iPhone is the only reason to put up with AT&T as a wireless carrier. (Though to be fair to AT&T, basically every US wireless character is pathetic and stagnant.) AT&T’s latest misstep, however, hits very close to home. Apparently, bills being sent to iPhone customers are running over 50 sheets of paper in length (thankfully printed double-sided) due to the inane itemization of every single data transmission made during the billing period. I visit web sites and check my email on my iPhone all the time, and each individual data transfer results in a line item on the resulting bill. The iPhone comes with an unlimited data plan, so each of these line items is billed at $0.00. I can’t imagine a more useless waste of paper. I signed up for paperless billing as soon as I set up my online account, so hopefully I won’t have to find one of these monstrosities in my mailbox. I would imagine that I am in the minority in this regard, though, amongst the hundreds of thousands of iPhone users, and thus we can add millions of wasted sheets of paper to AT&T’s long list of screw ups.
August 17th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
There are places (e.g. computer parts) where competition is working excellently, continually progressing and producing lots of new, good products with very low margins … wireless telecom isn’t one of them (at least not at the end-user level). The telcos are too busy trying to avoid having the internet and communications become commodity-like (which, inevitably, it will) … because when it does, it becomes way less profitable.
Unfortunately, it seems gov’t often succumbs to the argument/spin that this high profitability means ‘more jobs’, partly because mass lay-offs are obvious and pointed … a message which only really has heft when it’s so painful to lose a job (and health insurance …)