AT&T Bill Fiasco Reveals Industry Secret

As you undoubtedly heard, the first round of AT&T bills were sent to iPhone early adopters last week. Many were delivered in boxes and most were dozens of pages long, with some known to be nearly 300 pages long. What you did not hear was that a deep dark cell phone industry secret was revealed by this minor SNAFU: this fiasco never happened before despite the fact that AT&T has presumably at least a few million users of other fancy phones, despite the fact that the billing system is the same. Why not? Well, it's not because the billing system was magically screwed up for the iPhone launch. The billing system would have sent phone bills dozens or hundreds of pages long to users of fancy "Smart phones" like the Windows Mobile Phones if they had ever bothered to access the internet dozens of times a day, like iPhone users are clearly doing.

iPhone is clearly different. The billing system was the same. iPhone users are, well, using iPhone internet access, Google Maps, and other features with a frequency not seen among users of other high end cell phones.

This article describes the billing fiasco in detail: iPhone bill is surprisingly Xbox HUGE (lol).

Another example of the enormity of the bills.