Wireless Carriers Finally Cave On Overage Fees; Reluctantly Agree To Stop Treating Customers Like ATMs
from the it'd-be-a-great-racket-if-it-wasn't-for-these-stupid-customers dept
About a year ago, various wireless service providers found themselves under investigation by the FCC for sky-high overage fees. Of course, they protested this charge in the form of hilarious statements, expressing “concern” that their customers might be “confused” if they were warned about impending overage charges. Some even went so far as to claim that customers obviously wanted overage charges because (get this) customers racked up overage charges.To wit:
“For accounts that repeatedly go into overage, it is reasonable to infer that it is a matter of consumer choice. These customers are either indifferent to overages or are making the deliberate decision to incur overages because it is the most cost-efficient solution for their usage patterns.”
Or maybe, just maybe, customers wanted to be informed of these possible overage charges but no cell phone company was interested in telling them. While tools are available for consumers to track their own usage, this is not something that’s promoted very heavily (or indeed, at all) by most phone companies.
Well, the FCC has finally stared down the wireless carriers, who have decided to voluntarily (through gritted teeth) implement many of the rules suggested by the FCC, rather than deal with being regulated by the government.
Customers will receive free text alerts in real-time when they’re about to exceed their limits, CNET reports. The move is supposed to cut down on the “bill shock” people may feel when hit with sky-high rates for extra usage. Wireless carriers will also warn customers who travel overseas about the additional fees they may incur.
Of course, this being a government-related decision (and one performed under presumable duress), don’t expect to be notified any time soon.
Under the volunteer measures, wireless carriers have 18 months to put their warning systems in place.
Not only that, but your months-away warnings may not be timely enough, especially for those of you with notorious text-fiends (read: teenage children) on your mobile plans.
Some providers, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, already warn their customers as their data use approaches the limit. However, these warnings may be delayed. AT&T, for example, takes 24 hours.
24 hours?!? That’s like 3 years of texting for normal users! The good news is that sometime within the next two years, your mobile carrier may have to speed up its notification system to something approaching “real time.”
Until then, you may want to consider switching to an unlimited plan or putting your kids up for adoption, whichever is cheaper.
Filed Under: fcc, overage fees, wireless
Companies: at&t, verizon wireless
Comments on “Wireless Carriers Finally Cave On Overage Fees; Reluctantly Agree To Stop Treating Customers Like ATMs”
Overage charges?
One thing I completely fail to understand. The per-minute or per-megabyte charges when you exceed your plan are usually FAR higher than the same rate within your plan. For almost anything I can think of, the cost per unit FALLS when you buy in larger quantities.
What is the economic driver behind this thinking, other than monopolistic practices that all the other post-pay carriers do the same thing? Why wouldn’t carriers welcome these heavy users with unit costs that match or are somewhat lower than the plan unit costs?
Certainly, carriers would shun heavy users when the plan is unlimited, with no unit costs! But if a carrier offered a plan with decreasing charges as you bought more, the sting of not having “unlimited” (which never really is) would surely be lessened, with much happier and more loyal customers.
And if you say that there’s only limited total radio bandwidth, then why do those same carriers offer you lower per-unit rates when you buy a bigger plan?
Re: Overage charges?
If you think economic drivers and such have anything to do with cell companies’ pricing structures, you need to look a little more carefully at the world around you.
Remember, if one includes the entire TCO of the US Space Shuttle program, the price of data to/from the space shuttle is STILL lower than the price of text messages, per kb.
“Until then, you may want to consider switching to an unlimited plan or putting your kids up for adoption, whichever is cheaper.”
Of course, you could actually teach them a little responsibility, and perhaps take responsibility for them. I realize, however, that this is not the American way, because our failings are always someone else’s fault (preferable a large corporation).
Re: Or rather.
Perhaps something like:
“Hey kid, you want a phone? Cool. Best get a job so you can pay for it.”
TANSTAAFL.
🙂
Re: Re: Or rather.
/me flashes back to econ 101
gah I thought I had deleted all those files
Re: Re: Or rather.
“Hey kid, you want a phone? Cool. Best get a job so you can pay for it.”
“When I was your age, we had to walk uphill — wait, what was I complaining about? I’m too bitter and stupid to be sure.”
Unless there was something VERY wrong with your family, your mom didn’t charge you a monthly fee of $80/month (plus overage fees) when you were a teenager to spend all evening chatting with your girlfriend.
Texting now is exactly the same as doing that — only texting has an arbitrary, capricious, and utterly INSANE premium associated with it, due to the utterly monopolistic stranglehold a tiny number of companies have on the American cell phone market.
Since the US government hasn’t the guts to do something about the monopolies, they’re making the token gesture of making the phone companies warn people before raping them — but this has nothing to do with you having a small penis, a smaller brain, and masses of self loathing you feel the need to project onto every random article you read.
Re: Re: Re: Or rather.
LOL
Re: Re: Re: Or rather.
As I once saw in a book teaching you how to sign…”its not rape if you yell SURPRISE!”
Re: Re: Re: Never met MY mom...
…did you?
Re: Re: Re:2 Never met MY mom...
If you’re implying what I think you’re implying, I have — or a reasonable facsimile.
That’s why I stipulated, “Unless there was something VERY wrong with your family” — because I know that it’s not impossible for such a thing to occur, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.
Re: Re: Re:2 Never met MY mom...
Actually, I should have just replied with this quote:
Of course, my mom used to charge me up front for breast feeding — but what the hell, I was in high school at the time.
-Simon Travaglia, IIRC
Re: Re: Re: Or rather.
No my parents expected me to use either: AIM or email, the house phone (local calls) all for the low price of ZERO additional dollars to their existing monthly bills (parents had broadband internet (1-way cable) before I was in high school). When I got my cell phone (High School) I paid the “add-a-line” charge of $20/month AND any additional fees I caused… very reasonable. A cell phone is not an entitlement, its a privilege.
Re: Re:
it seems that you have missed the whole point of the article (that seems to go with the whole ac mentality). it is not possible to teach them personal responsibility if they cannot monitor their personal actions. nothing improves without feedback.
Re: Re: Re:
This is only a warning system. Actual usage is general available online – plus anyone with half a brain can figure out about how many text messages they have sent in a day anyway.
So what you are suggesting is that because the corporations don’t send you a reminder every 5 messages, effectively the consumer has no way to know what they are doing?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
If you had a family (that is, if you could manage to have sex with anything other than your own hand without sneaking up on it), you might have had some exposure to the idea of “family plans” and in the larger picture, the idea of having to account for and interact with OTHER HUMAN BEINGS.
I’ll try to explain this in small words so you don’t get confused:
When OTHER PEOPLE (those fleshy things you sometimes see when going out to collect your wellfare cheque) and YOU are living together, sometimes there is a thing called BABIES which happen when YOU and OTHER PEOPLE like each other enough.
Before many years have past, those BABIES have become CHILDREN, which are kind of like OTHER PEOPLE, except for smaller, and no constitutional rights. After they’ve figured out how to move their limbs without falling over too much, they usually have a developmentally-driven need to interact with OTHER CHILDREN — this is called “socialisation” and is considered a healthy thing by most psychologists who aren’t on too many drugs themselves.
Now remember, this isn’t like that scary scary guy I read about in some whore’s memoirs who narrated HER actions as well as his: “now you do this, and I do that, and you do the other thing . . .” — these OTHER PEOPLE and CHILDREN are not figments of one’s imagination; they don’t just do and act exactly how you want them to.
If this isn’t too confusing for you, you’ve probably realised by now that all of this means that in a FAMILY (a collection of OTHER PEOPLE you are related to) you don’t know exactly what every single other person is doing at every single moment.
Since you and these OTHER PEOPLE probably all want/need cell phones, there are things called FAMILY PLANS which give multiple people access to a common pool of minutes/texts at a discount, compared to buying plans individually.
However, this is the problem, and I know this may be hard, but read slowly and get your social worker to help you if you get scared: when YOU and OTHER PEOPLE are using RESOURCES at the same time, and YOU don’t know exactly what those OTHER PEOPLE are doing at a given moment, you can’t account for what they’re doing!
What they’re doing might include making calls; it might include texting! You can’t count their minutes used, or their texts sent/received, without wasting MORE minutes and MORE texts, making them continually report to YOU what they are doing! Exactly like this:
So what you are suggesting is that because the corporations don’t send you a reminder every 5 messages, effectively the consumer has no way to know what they are doing?
Now do you understand? Or do I need to start over from the beginning?
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
s/past/passed/
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
S, first off, keep your personal insults to yourself. You may have experience with welfare checks, but I don’t.
Those “OTHER PEOPLE” you refer to are your responsiblity until they come of age. You cannot pawn off their well being or bahavior training to a corporation because you don’t feel the need or the justification to care about what your children are doing.
The rest your capital letter ranting makes me pine for the days of RD when he was off his meds. Are you two related?
Re: Re: Re:3 Re:
So you’re saying that a man owns his wife?
How old fashioned of you.
Remember, CHILDREN are not the only kind of OTHER PEOPLE which occur in a family dynamic.
Also, I neglected to mention this detail, but CHILDREN can only be influenced — not controlled. In other words, even in households with a relatively high degree of discipline, CHILDREN do not always do what they’re told.
Further more, none of your yammering addresses the issue of parents who continue to maintain a family plan for their CHILDREN (above the legal age) in college, etc.
But I guess maybe you’re the kind of creature which drops all association with its offspring the second it’s no longer legally obligated to feed them.
By the way, want to know why nobody’s jumped in to your defence? It’s because you’re a corporate apologist with the morals of a snake, and nobody cares if I rip you to pieces.
Re: Re: Re:4 Re:
Please don’t insult the douche bag. It is not capable of actually thinking, and it only makes them madder. Too bad it wasn’t the good old old days, where you could simply bitch-slap the shit out of them, and walk away satisfied that you had done all you could to rectify the situation, and it was now up to them to learn, or not.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
what a douchebag – put a lid on the sarcasm, jerk
Re: Re: Re: Re:
To bad children don’t have half a brain.
Specially that children that didn’t reach the 35 year mark.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
” plus anyone with half a brain can figure out about how many text messages”
Then add all those values together because of the *FAMILY PLAN*..
You know, most families actually have more than one person.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
I already explained this.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
“plus anyone with half a brain can figure out about how many text messages they have sent in a day anyway.”
sure but how much data did you use today?
Re: Re: Re: Re:
When Kids (and myself on occasion) send a few hundred texts (300-400 seriously) its easily to lose track of your daily messages… granted after 1500 txt/mth you might as well just buy unlimited… which is what I have.
Re: Re: Re:2 Re:
oops, thats 300-400 txts/day
Re: Re:
Even if you teach them responsibility, you still run into the problem that texts received count against you. My parents ran into this problem with my brother. All of his friends would text him even when he told them not to. After a month of that, they cut off his ability to send or receive texts completely. This effected him severely socially as texts are the primary method of non-face to face communication for teenagers these days.
The adoption option sounds like a good opportunity to make some money LoL
Re: Re:
Sorry AC but there is nobody that WANTS a teenager to care for. The only opportunity is to SPEND money, not make it.
It only becomes profitable when they get married and have grand children.
Just call me grandpa.
“24 hours?!? That’s like 3 years of texting for normal users!”
Wouldn’t 3 years be like 3 years? Your use of hyperbole is a overly dramatic and borders on trollism. Are you troll seeding?
Re: Re:
You either really don’t get it or you don’t care. Kids text at the rate of thousands of messages per month. Many, maybe most, adults text at the rate of a few hundred messages per month. His description is quite adequate.
Re: Re:
your clearly hyperbolic joke is obvious and hyperbolic, i am offended
Re: Re:
I concur with the AC.
I believe it is the only writing style Cush is capable of based of his current body of techdirt posts.
Many (if not all) of my comments on his early posts were to point this out, and that it was very much being force fed rather than just laying out the facts from with which to draw an opinion.
Re: Re: Re:
i find it entertaining in addition to being informative. if you don’t like the hyperbole, then move on to the next article. mike usually keeps things a little more serious.
by the way, most humorous writing (of which this was obviously an example) involves some kind of exaggeration. it’s simply a writing style. you may want to also refer to the writings of mark twain, douglas adams, charles dickens for examples where it is actually good (sorry tim).
Re: Re:
Are you an dogless idiot?
Re: Re: Re:
I have a dog, what’s he have to do with this?
Re: 24 hours
My kid can send and receive over 400 texts in one day. 8400 in a month is the most I have noticed. I probably average about 400 texts in one year, not three, so yeah, way to go with the uber exaggeration, Tim.
Re: Re: 24 hours
Yea cause there is no way (especially with a family plan of 2-3 kids) that someone could txt 2-3 times more what your kids do. or someone that texts 2-3 times less than what you do.
What about when you leave the country?
I rode my motorcycle to Canada last month and got a flat tire a few hours across the border. I turned on my Droid and immediately got a text message that I may get fees for being out of the country. I did end up paying about $20 more on my next bill for the phone calls I made. I couldn’t get my data plan to work for some reason; which was probably a good thing.
The really sad thing here is, when you see articles about people running up a $200,000 bill for using their phone in Canada, half the commenters on the article think the customer is stupid and deserves it. WTH? How can any sane person think that a few MB or even GB is worth $200 much less $200,000?
Re: What about when you leave the country?
You get the same effect any time you cross a border. It’s not news. Anyone who thinks just because there is roaming service offered that they should just go for it without consideration is a fool.
The $200,000 bill was one of the guys from Mythbusters, who used data extensively without consideration for what it would cost him out of country. He may be a very smart man in some ways, but that was an incredibly foolish assumption on his behalf.
I travel extensively, and always pick up a disposible sim-card with a local number (and more often now local data plans) at a reasonable cost. In most places, the costs are lower than the US carriers.
Re: Re: What about when you leave the country?
If you’re familiar with the story–he first called and confirmed the ‘out of country’ rate for where he was traveling to. He then used a sane and typical amount of data while out of the country.
And then, the lying scumhole cellular company claimed he owed an outrageous fee.
(Troll harder.)
Re: Re: Re: What about when you leave the country?
Actually, the story I was referring to was a lady who had a family plan with her 2 deaf brothers. The brothers went to visit someone in Canada and ran up a $200,000 bill. The fact that this is apparently a common occurrence tells you that it is extremely unreasonable to try to charge this kind of fee.
I don’t understand the mentality that people have that they can check their conscience at the door when they go to work. They somehow feel it isn’t them personally screwing someone, it is the company. The thing is, companies are intangible objects and all decisions are made by people.
Re: Re: Re:2 What about when you leave the country?
Well it is a coping mechanism, if they don’t do it they commit suicide or go on a shooting spree.
Re: Re: Re:3 What about when you leave the country?
If only they’d just shoot themselves.
Re: Re: Re:4 What about when you leave the country?
I’d prefer they shoot your parents, so at least there’d be no more possibility of cretins such as yourself being produced again.
Re: Re: What about when you leave the country?
Why let people incur that kind of debt if not to get more money from them?
They know people want pay that kind of money, why service or not put a limit on it?
You see it even harms them, as people start to get concious about it and don’t use the service as much.
Re: What about when you leave the country?
I live in San Diego, and a few times, when I’ve gotten close to the border, I was sent a friendly “Welcome to Mexico” text that was all the warning I would have gotten before being raped by international fees without ever leaving the country. A friend of mine lives away from the city and she always has to check her phone to make sure it isn’t claiming she is in Mexico before she uses it.
This. Is. Wrong.
Re: Re: What about when you leave the country?
Same here, only on the northern border. My family went to the San Juan Islands, which are definitely in the US, and lo and behold our next bill had a few extra dollars on it because it claimed we went to Canada. I don’t remember getting a warning text though.
Re: Re: What about when you leave the country?
We have a camp near the Canadian border and this has happened a few times, Called AT&T, and ‘somehow’ they took a deeper look at the calls in question (assuming they can see secondary cell towers that assisted the calls? or signal strength direction based on each transmitter) and took the international fees off the bill. Kinda creepy that they can do that rough location triangulation a month after the call, but nice that they also can fix your bill.
Re: What about when you leave the country?
How can any sane person
any sane person
sane person
And here is the flaw in your reasoning: these are not sane people.
Re: What about when you leave the country?
You were lucky that they didn’t push an update. One of my co-workers went to the Bahamas recently for her wedding. While there she had the phone on for a short time (She knew about roaming charges) and it racked up a $150 bill. Even with data roaming disabled (she had asked me to check it since I’m a net admin), the phone downloaded a system update and she never received any warning.
Re: What about when you leave the country?
“How can any sane person think that a few MB or even GB is worth $200 much less $200,000?”
Because you agreed to it in your contract, duh!
What do you mean you didn’t comb over all 20 pages of fine print? What sane person signs a contract they didn’t read and understand in its entirety?
/sarc (or is it?)
IT’s just another dishonest way of making money. No company tries to be dishonest and take our money quietly without our knowledge, no. This doesn’t happen.
Always read the small lines at the end of the contract =)
Re: Re:
It doesn’t matter what the lines at the end of the contract say since the courts don’t require Verizon to do actual math.
I'm sure that...
they will work on ways to increase their income in some other way that screws everybody over.
Wishful thinking...
My take on this: phone companies that do have unlimited accounts (such as Sprint where I currently have my service) should NEVER be able to charge you more than the price of the unlimited plan for normal usage charges. International rates and things of that nature, obviously could be charged over and beyond the unlimited plan rate.
This kind of price structure would tell me that the company believes customer is the priority and not seeing how much money they can get the customer to part with on a monthly basis, which is how it appears now.
I know it all seems so simple – the great part, it REALLY is!
A better solution
There should be an option on wireless accounts to not allow any overage – once I hit my 200 messages or 2GB or 750 minutes, any attempt to go farther would be met by a notification – “You’ve exceeded your plan limits; contact customer service.”
At that point, if I want to, I can log on to my account or call customer service to override the block for the remainder of the month.
Re: A better solution
I like this method in addition to my idea above – max price is the cost of the unlimited plan! I’m not sure there would be much more you could ask of your phone service provider at that point when it comes to billing!
Re: A better solution
This reminds me of banks and their inability to block transactions for insufficient funds. The banks’ justification was that people don’t like to be embarrassed by a card rejection. They would much rather get caught with multiple $35 overage fees.
It doesn’t matter how badly a money making scheme harms a customer. As long as the bank/phone company can spin it to be a service for the customer all is fine and dandy.
Personally I am fine with being denied. Sure I may get frustrated that my Little Debbie craving will not be satiated every once and a while, or that I may not be able to call home if I am going to be late towards the end of the month. I would much rather be denied than hit with obscene expenses.
Re: A better solution
This is the primary reason I switched to StraightTalk. (This is faint praise as StraightTalk has its own problems with customer service, having to use their phones, etc.)
However, I pay a flat $30 for 1,000 minutes, 1,000 texts, and 50 MB of data per month. Period. If I exceed one of these limits, that part stops working. If I want unlimited for all three, it is $15 more, but I’m sure if I were in a location where service would incur ridiculous charges it just wouldn’t work there, either.
For all they’ve done to screw this up, WalMart correctly read popular desire for a flat fee for phones. Prior to changing over, our last bill from AT&T was eight pages long. Maybe AT&T thought that by explaining all their “death by a thousand cuts” charges, I’ll be happier with them?
NMM
As putting a child up for adoption almost never costs anything for the one who is letting go of the child, adoption is the most economical choice.
And what did the banks do?
All we have to do is look at the banks when they lost the ability to charge for overdraft fees without an opt in by the consumer to see where this is going to head…
“We assume it was a deliberate decision on the customer’s part to accrue the overage charges because we went out of our way to hide the fact they were accruing until 3 years after the fact, at which point we sent a couple guys named Bruno and Luigi to collect on the charges and the 243% APR added interest. We think this is fair and obvious.”
Let’s not forget telling the customer that their out-of-country charges are 1/100th of what they really are because they don’t understand the difference between cents and dollars. (And again.)
So they’re used to either hiding information from the customer or lying to them, and getting away with it. This new-fangled idea of being transparent, honest, and responsible? It could bankrupt the phone companies!
I’m surprised they didn’t try to stall further by claiming that the technology isn’t up to automating the notification feature. Though there’s still time for that. Next they’ll be splitting hairs about what “sufficient notice” is.
Forget fees, the advertized pricing shocks me!
Am I the only person who gets bill shock just watching the carrier’s commercials? Seriously, Maybe I’m just cheap, but I can’t justify $100 (plus unmentioned regulatory and because-we-can fees) a month for two phones in an age when the costs of hardware and wholesale connectivity are plummeting. I think parents should be able to give their kids phones (for safety, checking in, etc.) without worrying about forgoing saving for college, let alone worrying about overages. Maybe paying engineers to lock and cripple good phones and then stuff their limited onboard storage with crapware is expensive. I just feel that complaining about overage fees while allowing them to gouge us on the rest of the bill is short sighted.
Good
My bill should be the same every month.I agreed on a bill of $96.00 a month unlimited.Well my bill goes up to $150.00 a month and they can not tell me why.I have even it seen go below $96.00 a month.
Lee Bergeron
Good for users
The carriers that lock users into a plan needs to be banned first. Its a form of slavery to buy a locked phone and get bonded to the wireless carrier. Let us fight against it and buy only unlocked cell phones.