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677 page phone bill

677 page phone bill from iTapio on Vimeo.

I got a BlackBerry about a month and a half ago with AT&T / Cingular and asked for the unlimited data and text plan plan. A couple of weeks later, I got my first bill which was only a couple of pages long. Soon thereafter, I turned on Twitter notifications on my mobile to take advantage of the unlimited plan. Now, apparently it takes one full billing cycle to sign yourself onto ebilling. Lo and behold, I just received my mammoth-sized phone bill. Not in charges, which amounted to about $148, but in pages: 677.

Through Twitter, I have received about 15,000 text messages on my mobile. They all all arrive to the same phone number. The itemized bill lists the date, hour and minute I received each text message. Quite obviously, I won't go through to verify each of these, particularly when the charge on each one is precisely $0.00! I would have been just as happy with a single line item that read "Number of text messages received: 15,000"

See also iJustine's 300-page iPhone bill.

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October 10, 2007 in Mobile & Wireless | Permalink

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Comments

AT&T's wanton waste of natural resources simply disgusts me. Clearly what we have here is a communication problem. This is how it works:

1. Some corporate zombie in lower management is notified by his white-collared slaves that they're sending out phone bills that are hundreds of pages long.
2. Corporate zombie decides this is not a serious problem and bollocks to the environment.
3. He informs no one.
4. Alex gets 677-page phone bill

Incredible.

Posted by: Nick Harbaugh | Oct 10, 2007 12:29:47 PM

Hahahahaha... Beautiful :)

Posted by: Justine | Oct 10, 2007 12:39:20 PM

That's astounding! Phone bill in a box!

Posted by: latinbombshell | Oct 10, 2007 4:29:46 PM

geeeeeeeeeeeez. I can't believe it. And they made YOU pay for the shipping of your bill, yes? :-S

I'm already on ebilling for Sprint, although they don't put each text message you send/receive.. only every single call you send/receive. yikes! I like the PDFs better anyway, because I can easily save them to my HDD and not worry about keeping clutter around the house.

Still crazy with your 677.. You should, like, frame it lol.

Posted by: Lis | Oct 11, 2007 11:56:05 AM

They didn't actually make me pay for the postage, but all their overhead in postage and billing is eventually passed on to their customers.

I have asked for ebilling. What's striking is that two months *after* iJustine's 300-page iPhone bill, they would send out an itemized bill that's almost 700 pages long!

The itemized lines don't reflect different phone numbers, since the text messages I received originate from the same number, Twitter. The only difference is the time and date of each message.

They could have itemized the bill by date, for instance: "On Sept. 22, you received 200 text messages". This amount to some 30 lines for the month, which would be about a page-long bill.

Posted by: Alex | Oct 11, 2007 1:43:43 PM

There was noise about this in the first month of iPhone, then it got resolved. I have had a Blackberry and now an iPhone with AT&T, both with unlimited data. I never had this problem. I think the company is just randomly idiotic.

Posted by: shel israel | Oct 11, 2007 6:28:29 PM

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