Fri 11 Jul 2008
Today I had a message in my email InBox telling me that I had a new bill waiting for me from AT&T.
This particular bill was for my home telephone and DSL service. When I first got DSL, it was $15 a month. My home phone and DSL bill was around $30, and I was happy with that. Over the past couple of years, my bill has slowly crept up in price. The DSL price was an introductory price… A year or so after that went away, they decided to raise the price of DSL again.. So, my bill has been getting more and more expensive.
Today’s bill was for $44.xx. I thought that seemed annoying, so I went to their website to check it out. I noticed that last month’s bill was for $42.xx, and I decided to investigate.
It turns out that the difference was the long distance bill. I use my cell phone to make my calls. I don’t see any reason to do anything else. EXCEPT, in one very special case: When I need to send a fax. I was checking out a prospective tenant last month, and the previous landlord’s needed a fax of the authorization sheet. So, I had to send it to them. I ended up sending 3 different faxes for this. Each one was 1 minute long, and I was billed 12 cents for each minute. 36 cents, right?
WRONG!!!
My long distance bill was $2.34. The extra $1.98 was for fees and taxes. Let’s get one thing straight. I’m all for giving people what they need to survive. I understand infrastructure costs and all that jazz. But, when I spend 3 minutes on the phone at an advertised cost of 12 cents a minute, it annoys me to see a bill of $2.34.
When we look at the bill in more detail, we can quickly see that the majority of the cost is for AT&T’s Carrier Cost Recovery Fee, which is $1.49. Seriously, AT&T? Did my 3 one minute phone calls really cause you to need to recover $1.49 in carrier costs?
Anyway, if you’ve ever had issues with this sort of corporate capitalism, feel free to post below. I feel slightly better now, but I’m still $2.34 poorer for 3 tiny phone calls.
July 29th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
I agree as my bill has been identical to your’s. this 1.49 a month is nothing, but another gimmick for ATT to scam there customers. I have another 2 months of dish contract and I’m moving everything to cable. I don’t care if it cost more and then see if they collect there 1.49.
October 6th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Just spent a frustrating 10 mintues on the phone with an AT&T supervisor. According to the ATT website, that fee is only applied if you have long distance charges on your bill. I had none but still had a fee. Turns out, the monthly plan counts as a charge! Trouble is, I haven’t found a phone company that doesn’t have these bogus fees (usually with a different name.) Has anyone else?