Heed Administration on Regulation and Don’t Impose Bill Shock Rules, CTIA Says

"The Commission’s proposals reflect not only a misconception of the scope of the overage charge issue, but also severely underestimate the cost, time, and effort that would be required for implementation,” CTIA said. “Commenters recognize that wireless carriers would have to spend millions of dollars to modify their networks, alter their billing and customer service systems and certain legacy accounts, and develop new industry-wide procedures for reporting roaming usage.”

The FCC should “heed the spirit” of President Barack Obama’s Jan. 18 order on regulation and refrain from imposing new regulations on bill shock, CTIA said. The group cited recent reports that Chairman Julius Genachowski has instructed staff to follow the administration’s order even though the FCC is an independent agency (CD Feb 7 p1). CTIA also said wireless carriers are committed to working with the commission to address billing concerns. “The best evidence indicates that the overwhelming majority of consumers do not experience unexpected overage charges and are satisfied with their wireless service,” CTIA said.

AT&T said bill shock rules would fail any “rational cost-benefit analysis” if put to the test. “Pro-regulation commenters routinely overstate the benefits of new rules and ignore their costs,” AT&T said. “Most simply assert that providers could easily supply such alerts without offering any factual basis for that assertion.” Networks were not built to allow carriers to provide customers with real-time alerts about usage and overages, AT&T said. Providing such alerts would require network changes that would prove “exceptionally expensive,” the carrier said.

The record shows that carriers already make a wide array of tools available so customers can monitor and control their wireless usage, Verizon said: “While these tools may vary from carrier to carrier, that is the result of competitive differentiation, as each company determines the best ways to attract and retain the customers it seeks.”

Carriers themselves inadvertently demonstrated why bill shock rules are necessary in their comments opposing new rules, NASUCA said. “Carriers say that they have devised solutions that help customers avoid bill shock,” the group said. “The need to devise such solutions, however, simply underscores and confirms the problems and the need for solutions. Meanwhile, new complaints continue to surface.” NASUCA cited anecdotal evidence that carrier tools aren’t working.

Both AT&T and T-Mobile said they make numerous tools available for monitoring use, NASUCA said. “Yet an AT&T customer reports charges of $9,100, or $200 per minute, when his 14-year-old son watched 45 minutes of YouTube video on his telephone while in Guatemala,” the group said. “A T-Mobile customer reports incurring roaming charges on a trip to London in excess of $3,000.”

Bill shock is growing as a problem, Consumers Union said. “The January 2011 issue of Consumer Reports found that one in five respondents had received a higher than expected bill,” the group said. “Half of them were hit with least $50 in overage charges, and one in five was hit with more than $100 in overage charges.” Consumers Union submitted the stories from numerous wireless subscribers hit with bills much higher than they expected. “Consumers Union submits these Reply Comments to demonstrate that actual consumers across the country

are experiencing ‘bill shock’ and to respond to claims that no ‘bill shock’ rules are necessary.”

"Nothing commenters have filed persuades us that real-time alerts are unnecessary or infeasible,” the California Public Utilities Commission said. “Voluntary, individual usage control is not the equivalent of receiving alerts in real time which could enable a customer to act on the spot when the controls the subscriber may previously have implemented collide with unusual circumstances not contemplated by those control tools or are beyond the limits of those tools.”