My HUGE iPhone Bill

Late Friday night, Aug 10, I received an emaiil notice of my iPhone bill. The actual bill came yesterday Aug 11 in the snail mail. This bill was HUGE!!!!!!!!!! It was enormous. It was the funniest bill I'd seen in a long time.

It wasn't that the charges were high; they weren't. It was the normal $60 monthly charge plus $7 in taxes. It's just that the bill had 45 PAGES of details. One page was phone calls, there was a very short list of SMS text messages on the next page, and the remainder of the 45 pages was data services. Every Internet access was apparently recorded by date and time, though no specifics were included as to what was transferred. My wife noted data services in the middle of the night, which makes sense as it polls my Mac mail every 15 minutes.

Seems funny they'd highlight ever data service, given I have unlimited data access. I guess they have to do it, but it makes little sense to me. It did have high humor value however, so it was worth it I guess.

Any way you can have that cut down? It's not like we don't waste enough paper each year, is it?

yh get it cut down. thats quite a bit of paper each time

45 pages x 12 months = 540 sheets of paper per year

There was an article about this somewhere where the guy had over a hundred pages sent to him.

What's weird is that Blackberry users don't get such a large bill, and I would assume neither do people on the PDA plan. I don't see why AT&T couldn't make it so that iPhone users just got a summary of their data usage instead of every little detail (which btw, doesn't really provide any information).

We get the same thing with our monthly phone bill. It's generally that length or a little longer and none of us have an iPhone. It's just how Cingular does things...and no, it's not helpful.

Sure you could go to paperless billing, but using paper is good for the farmers that grow trees to make paper. Deforesting is so 80's. heh heh

I used to have a service provider back in the 90s that sent their statements like this. I'm not sure if it was Qwest or the real AT&T. I know you can get a paperless bill if you choose to pay your bill online.

I don't want to go paperless, but then again having a tree sacrificed to tell me I've been accessing the Internet during the month seems absurd.

After my next TELUS bill, I'm going paperless. TELUS sends be a thick envelope with a 13 page bill in it. After this month, I won't have to watch over my bill.

You may just wanna call AT&T about it...

Guess I'm not the only one in this situation. Here's a link I found over at Slashdot:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070811-iphone-bill-is-surprisingly-xbox-huge-lol.html

Read about that.

Send it to Greenpeace. They love to accuse Apple of all that's wrong with the environment. (Never mind that this is Cingular/ATT's idea.)

I have declined my paper bill and get mine off the internet. Still long, but they are not wasting all that paper.

I dont have an I-phone, But i heard somewhere somene is trying to hack one So it runs on a cell phone network (E.G telecom).

Its probably a hoax, but by the sounds of things, It seems better than the current system.

Dude I got the same thing. I couldnt believe the detailed list I got. Im sure the Save-the-Trees whack-o's would go crazy over my bill.

Talking about environment,

They packed most of the iPod nano's in recycle able packages, (I made them ) so they did that pretty well ;-)

Was pretty fun, because I knew how it looked etc. from the iPod nano before anyone knew hooah

Haha my first bill was about 30 or so pages. I switched to paperless and it's been great.

I'm a piker in comparison to iJustine. 300 pages. In a box. Good lord. (Btw, she's a geek and I believe she uses a MBP.)

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/wireless/phones/2007-08-14-iphone-bill_N.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdULhkh6yeA

A more important environmental concern...

How many pieces of paper must one burn in order to generate the electricity to view a paperless bill? HUHH? HUHH???!!! Take that!

Well, 50% of electricity comes from coal. Which makes this an unfair comparison because you can't print a dang thing on coal.