Okay Geek Farm
AT&T could be charging your iPad and iPhone for data, even when it's disabled
Brandon Davenport
I used to have an iPod touch, and I loved that thing to death with the apps, email and Youtube videos galore, but the day I purchased my first Smartphone (iPhone 4) my world turned upside-down. Of course I was familiar how cellular data worked (I sort of have to) but until I had a chunk of data all for myself, I never realized how revolutionary it is. The internet anywhere, anytime and anything you want — it’s really wonderful, but it’s abusively expensive (I live in Canada, derp) and sometimes carriers like to rake you over the coals — in this case AT&T is deceptively adding random data usage to your bill, just enough for overage fees.
The stripped down facts
According to BGR and MSNBC, AT&T is squeaking phantom data out of your 3G iPad and iPhone in very small increments at random times of the day. Every single one of the data requests sent from your iDevice is an overcharge and never an undercharge, and on average AT&T is “overcharging customer data usage by 7% to 14% and, in some rarer cases, by up to 300%”. Pretty crazy huh?
Now we know there are a bunch of you screaming “the phone doesn’t report data usage in real time, it’s sent in packs!” — but now it’s time for the shocker. The factor that determined AT&T was playing dirty was not “random charges on a bill” it was a series of tests involving iPhones and iPads where all dependencies requiring data were disabled. That means push notifications, location, apps running in the background and of course the master data and 3G switches in the settings app. The devices were left to sit for a month and low and behold, there were in fact significant charges for data on the bill next month, thirty-five different data charges to be exact.
AT&T Responds and attempts to explain themselves
Accurate billing is clearly important and, unfortunately, there have been some incorrect claims about our data usage billing practices. 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. Data usage for emailing, downloading applications, browsing the web, downloading a video or streaming music is all applied to a customers’ data plan. So are real-time updates to applications, such as weather updates, sports scores, or stock tickers. 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. [Thanks for the reply from AT&T BGR]
In summary, is this being blown out of proportion?
Well, we do have to note that all of this has been tied to a lawsuit trying to burn AT&T for everything above, so obviously the people trying to tie down AT&T want to be as loud as possible, but what makes this such a genuine claim is that we reported on this exact issue quite a while back. AT&T has been doing this for a while, and this only stacks the odds against them. It’s the perfect storm where millions of small overcharges effect consumers, and in the end create a huge payoff for AT&T. If you ask us, it’s a pretty messy situation created once again by the sheer weight of the Cell Phone Carrier Manopoly — but if you ask Joe Sixpack who is being charged an extra $20/mo for nothing he’ll wish he never signed a 2 year contract with the devil.
