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One Wired reader got an unpleasant surprise upon testing his new AT&T GoPhone last week: Whether or not a call has been connected, you are charged for the call after 30 seconds.
Lon McQuillin, a San Mateo, Calif.-based writer, decided to test his new pre-paid phone by calling his main cell phone, and it took a little while for it to start ringing. Once the other phone did start ringing, he ended the call without completing the connection.
Thinking he would be charged only*if the call were completed, McQuillen was shocked to find that he’d been billed $0.10 for the *call.
It was only subsequently that he discovered AT&T’s wireless customer agreement, available online, which*already overpaying), but for GoPhone users who are charged 10 cents per minute, those minutes can add up.
There are numerous past instances of carriers billing customers in questionable situations. Verizon was fined $77 million for unfairly charging 15 million customers for accidentally going online without a data plan back in October. And remember all those crazy roaming charges when people began traveling abroad with the original iPhone?
Are such charges legal? Certainly. Ethical? Doubtful. They certainly seem like cheap shots.
In the case of AT&T’s “30 seconds and you’re charged” policy, $0.10 may not be much, but across millions of subscribers over the course of a month, AT&T could be raking in quite a bit of money on short and failed GoPhone calls and overage fees for data plan subscribers who exceed their monthly minutes.
Unfortunately, exact numbers for that data aren’t readily available in any of AT&T’s recent sales reports or annual reports [.pdf].
Photo: Jason-Morrison/Flickr
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