At the end of last year I blogged about how cellular carriers make a bundle off of text messages, which cost them nothing to send. (Btw, in the meantime, my son set a new family record with 8,944 messages during, I believe, July.)

Now the NY Times’ David Pogue, the source for my original post, is back with more muck-raking. Yesterday he posted an article about how the carriers make a ton of money off accidental data downloads. I know this has happened to you — you accidentally hit the Internet button on your cellphone. (The article says that the phones are actually configured to encourage this.) You catch the mistake right away and hit the End button. Doesn’t matter … you’re dinged $1.99 for a data download. Why? The phone company’s billing software is programmed to round up, so you get billed for a 1MB download.

How much do they make off of what Pogue calls “greedy nastiness”? Pogue says a reader, who claims to work for Verizon, has the answer:

“Every month, the 87 million [Verizon] customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!”

And that comes out to $3.6 billion per year.

Pogue goes on to say that AT&T does the same thing. I’m not sure I agree. We had a problem with my son pocket-dialing the Internet. I called AT&T’s customer service and they blocked that feature for his line; we haven’t been dinged since. I’ve never had a bad experience with AT&T’s customer service.

Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Education Services Manager
on November 13, 2009 - 9:30 am

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