Class Action Lawsuit Accuses AT&T of Overbilling
Class Action Lawsuit Accuses AT&T of Overbilling
Posted 02/01/2011 at 7:33am
| by Paul Lilly
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A federal class action lawsuit alleges "AT&T bills systematically overstate the amount of data used on each data transaction involving an iPhone or iPad account," Electronista reports. The lawsuit likens the situation to a tampered gas pump that "charges for a full gallon when it pumps only nine-tenths of a gallon."
Patrick Hendricks, who's named as the plaintiff in the suit, hired a consulting firm to investigate the matter. After a two month study, the firm alleges that Web traffic was frequently inflated by 7 to 14 percent, though sometimes as much as 300 percent. Because it's usually done in small increments, subscribers aren't likely to notice, though the cumulative effect could lead to a "significant portion" of AT&T's data revenues.
"Transparent and accurate billing is a top priority for AT&T," a company spokesperson told MacNN. "In fact, we've created tools that let our customers check their voice and data usage at any time during their billing cycle to help eliminate bill surprises. We have only recently learned of the complaint, but I can tell you that we intend to defend ourselves vigrorously."
The timing of the suit couldn't be any worse for AT&T, which is losing its exclusivity deal with Apple and it's iPhone once Verizon starts selling the device later this month.
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aarcane
February 04, 2011 at 11:38am
in the entire time I've had an iPhone, I've never been billed for any overages, and I've used my iPhone to download in excess of 10GB in some months.. Oh wait, I paid the $30 for the unlimited plan.
I think there are two obvious morals to take away from this story: 1) Don't be cheap, get the unlimited plan. and 2) Don't be a thief, or you'll get caught sooner or later.
wintercoder
February 01, 2011 at 10:05am
During evaluation/negotiation of a LARGE (1000+ line) contract with AT&T, we quoted our daily data usage to be less than 100K in uploads for FTP traffic for a data solution used with each of the lines of service.
With roughly 23 business days in a month, our data usage should EASILY fit under 5MB... so they quoted us a 10MB monthly plan just to be safe.
We then monitored one session with a line trace ... and proved that AT&T was NOT accurately calculating our data use. Some data sessions showed an overstatement of data transmitted by as much as a factor of 10!. (Our FTP log file showed total of about 27KB xmit/recvd, with ATT's logs showing roughly 200K. FTP data transfers are not bloated with overhead... and ATT's engineers could not explain why the network was reporting such an overage... they quickly pushed the issue aside and adjusted the limits of our data plan.
I'd say that this could be a valid lawsuit.
Vengful Teapot
February 01, 2011 at 8:49am
"We have only recently learned of the complaint, but I can tell you we plan to defend ourselves vigorously"
No Suprise here you will find most thieves will defend themselves vigorously.
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