T-Mobile USA to charge for bills. Sound Off!

T Mobile USA will begin to charge an additional $1.50 for Paper Billing. That does not include the $1.99 for Detailed billing, which includes call log, text message log, ect. Now that new fee is for anyone recieving a basic summary of thier bills. Some customer could be paying $3.50 just to recieve their T Mobile USA bill.

Now I totally agree with that. In the age of internet and doing everything paperless and electronically I think it's a step in the future and a sign of the times. Everyone is going green to save trees, and hey it's cheaper for T Mobile. I don't judge T Mobile at all, mainly because everyone reading this right now, wishes there was a way for them to save money on their bills each month. So why can't big companies try as well?

That's what I think, what do you think? Let's try to stay on topic also[/b]

save money? they are trying to make money. 1.50 for a bill is outrageous. pathetic.

My general thoughts of this have been discussed in another thread, but I'll also chime in here since this thread has been started.

It is ridiculous for T-Mobile to charge customers for general paper billing. I understand that T-Mobile and AT&T needs to charge people for detailed billing due to the fact that detailed billing can become quite lengthy (last time I checked my AT&T detailed bill online it was 20 pages long). However, T-Mobile's simple paper billing takes up no more than two pages at most. My mother is currently with T-Mobile and we're moving her under my AT&T plan due to the fact that T-Mobile is starting this ridiculous stunt. In my office on my high-quality LED printer, I can print and mail two sheets of paper for almost nothing, certainly a lot less than $1.50 that T-Mobile is charging. In fact, I mail 99% of my office docs using Priority Mail with Delivery Confirmation or Certified Mail, which costs me around $5-10 per mailing. Do I charge mailing fees for these? Absolutely not.

T-Mobile's bills are even smaller than AT&T's and AT&T doesn't charge to receive a standard bill in the mail. Plus, T-Mobile has been mailing out bills for years for free, even somewhat detailed bills for free for a while, so they have no justice in adding a charge onto customer's bills for two sheets of paper.

The case you are referring to is the 500 page iPhone bill, in which that customer was signed up for detailed billing, hence the large box and shipping cost inferred upon that. In that case if the customer wants those large of bills shipped to their homes, they should have to pay a shipping cost to cover AT&T's expense. However, what T-Mobile is doing has nothing to do with detailed billing, but charging customers for a mere two sheets of paper. This is highway robbery.

Furthermore, many of us enterprise customers require a copy of the paper bill on file while we are under contract with our service provider, so that in any form of billing dispute, we would have written proof from the service provider of the charges and be able to produce official evidence for the case (OK, so my office is next to a law firm so their legal knowledge has rubbed off on me). While my company has embraced cloud computing and other forms of virtual computing methods (online task lists, wikis, online collaborative document sharing, online schedules, etc.), for the record we require some form of official statement from our service provider so that any billing dispute can be handled with official records.

What we tell our business parters is to signup for regular paper billing statements from the service provider, then use the online account for accessing the detailed records and usage statistics. Some accounting/tax firms require written receipts/statements for accounting purposes (ironically they file taxes and keep accounting records online).

Personally, T-Mobile should be reported to the BBB for the actions they have partaken in, since there are many customers who are unable to access paperless billing. Furthermore, T-Mobile's "save a tree" and "go green" claims hold no water due to the fact that T-Mobile wasn't consuming a major quantity of paper to begin with. If T-Mobile really cared, they would simply resort to recycled paper methods and ask their customers to recycle their bills, a much wiser method than incurring charges onto customers bills.

parkernathanm,

I really enjoyed what you wrote, and I agree. I totally see your point. That is the type of sound off I wanted to read.

Keep in mind that T Mobile is the number three carrier in the US. The last ting they would wants is to slip behind Sprint/Nextel, if yu ask me that would be embarrassing. In order to maintain their spot, they need to save or in this case make money to attract newer customers and to retain existing customers with new phones, features, ect. Now I don't work for T Mobile, I work for AT&T, honestly if you ask me I'm glad T Mobile started doing this, it means more new activations for me.

Finally people are very resistant to change. They hate change, anytime something new is implimented ANYWHERE they push back. After a while customer will either just jump ship or view everything online. So parkernathan, thank you for your post, it was awesome.

Hey MurphyLaw,

Thanks for your feedback! I enjoyed reading it.

I think T-Mobile's biggest problem is someone there isn't doing their job in terms of service. After searching the BBB's website, T-Mobile gets an F on the rating scale. Sprint gets a C, Verizon gets a B, and AT&T an A+ (B back during the Cingular days because of a small adware mixup that was properly resolved when the new AT&T took over). And, T-Mobile's network is far inferior to AT&T's.

The only good thing that comes out of this is I see that AT&T will be getting more customers out of the deal. My mother now sees the faults of T-Mobile, and we're moving her phone over to AT&T (I even flashed Cingular's firmware onto it and got a Cingular battery cover just so we can be rid of the whole T-Mobile look). What good came out of this is that people are finally seeing that the so called "lower priced" service providers don't offer the quality and reliability you get from people such as AT&T. Sure, T-Mobile's announcing 1,000 minutes for the same price as AT&T's 450, which may attract some customers, but in order to get unlimited mobile-mobile calling (which isn't going to be near as good as AT&T's) and other features, you have to pay extra. Plus, they don't even offer Rollover minutes, a feature I love about AT&T. Since many people I call are on AT&T, I save countless minutes a month, and I get to keep my unused minutes. These are things you just don't get with the lower priced providers. So where's the real deal at?

Basically, when I see how ignorant T-Mobile's pricing policies are, how difficult the whole Verizon/Alltel merger has been, and how inferior Sprint's network has been (a person I talked to who had Sprint kept entering dead zones when we talked), it makes me more glad I'm on AT&T, and it's not just because I chose the iPhone either. If Verizon came out with an iPhone, I'd still stay with AT&T. Why? Better global coverage, better service, exclusive features Verizon can't offer, and a truly better experience. iPhone users need to see that they have an excellent provider backing their iPhone.

OK, I'm getting a little off topic here, but let me chime in a few more things about AT&T and the iPhone.

A while ago I had a cable issue where my sync cable frayed. I called Apple. They wouldn't send me out a new one unless I gave them a credit card number, which I didn't have because my bank was messing around getting my credit card issued to me (I won't even go there). I called my nearest AT&T Store. They told me come in and they'd take care of me. They did. I went in, got a brand new cable, handed them back the frayed one. Problem solved. In this case, it was AT&T who fixed my issue, not Apple. I felt good to be an AT&T subscriber (my local store also treats me VERY WELL. Excellent reps there!).

Also, when we move we'll no longer get to use AT&T's landline or DSL since we're going to be in an area only serviced by Windstream. However, I'll still use AT&T for my wireless, and I'm switching to AT&T DirecTV as our TV (we currently have Dish with AT&T) so that I can have all of my services I can with AT&T and just the others for the rest.

So, my experiences as an AT&T subscriber have been quite well.

Sorry to venture off the topic, guys! I just had to add a few AT&T complements in there!

Thanks for listening!

Nathan

Commenting on my BBB ratings, so it goes to show you, who would you rather do business with? A company who gets and F or a company who gets an A+? It just shows you who's the better provider (AT&T).

BTW and OT again, wise move AT&T made switching to DirecTV. I haven't liked Dish ever since we got it. AT&T would always get pounded by Dish complaints, so they finally went with DirecTV. I can't wait to switch over. BBB Ratings for Dish? F DirecTV? B (would be A but the B is because of a telemarketing issue).

OK, back to the topic about cell phones.

You wonder why big companies don't do this? The last company I worked for quit giving pay stubs out to those who used direct deposit. You had to look on their web page to see/print your pay stub if you needed to.

nunya,

It's simple, to you and I, it's one piece of paper. Allow me to explain, to the company let's choose mine AT&T. We have 294,600 employees (that's including myself). Now regular paper for a laser printer from Staples is $9.99 for 500 sheets. That works out to $.019 per sheet. Now lets say AT&T uses the same laser printer paper, with 294,600 employees. Saying for the sake of the discussion every employee gets a paper check. That amounts to $55,974 per pay period. AT&T pays bi-weekly that would equal $1,455,324. That's alot of money for a company to shell out.

Now let's look at the original topic, T Mobile charging for billing. T Mobile is looking to save money. Now after thinking about the post I initally started I believe persons who are 65 should be exepmt from the charging for paper bill rule. Now let's say T Mobile has 55,000 customers, (I know it's less than AT&T and Verizon but more than Sprint/Nextel). Using what parkernathan said:

"T-Mobile has been mailing out bills for years for free, even somewhat detailed bills for free for a while, so they have no justice in adding a charge onto customer's bills for two sheets of paper. "

Now 55,000 customers recieving 2 peices of paper each month @ $0.19 works out to be $20,900 per month per customer. That's $250,800 per year! Remember thay are a business, they have to pay their employees, the cell phone manufactures, acessory makers, and believe it or not they have to pay rent and electric too. Now instead of raising your cellular bill they opted for paperless billing or pay up. That's my take on this and reply to nunya.

This is an intelluctual conversation we are having here. I want to hear your two cents.

I get discounts when I purchase paper in bulk, so I'm hoping companies such as AT&T and T-Mobile do the same (or am I the only one who prints a lot around here).

I think T-Mobile could work it out to much cheaper than $0.19 for two sheets of paper. I can chunk out more sheets than that for a couple of cents on my LED printer, and that's with a gloss finish. T-Mobile can afford it, they're just wanting to embrace the whole "go green" concept. Take that back, it's not just about going green.

I'm kind of thinking it's their new minute concept here. They rolled out a 1,000 minute plan for the same price most providers charge for less than half that. T-Mobile really can't pull that off. They simply don't have a large enough customer base and the funds to pull of 1,000 minutes for $40 a month. I could see AT&T or Verizon having what it takes to pull it off, but even then it'd take a chunk out of network expenses. T-Mobile's jumped in and "promotionalized" themselves too much in order to gain customers that they're realizing that they're coming at a loss. So now they have three choices: raise the cost of the 1,000 minute plan, lower the amount of minutes for $40 (two things that would cause a suicide), or tack on a paper billing charge all in the disguise of "green". It's not too hard to figure out that T-Mobile's sunk themselves on a promotion and is grasping at straws to pull themselves out.

As for nunya's comment, yeah, now that one of my dad's check is on direct deposit, he has to call a phone number in order to ensure it's there. He stays nervous each month until he makes the call. Oh, why can't they just send him a slip! I'd ALMOST pay extra for that service so that I could get some peace!

T-Mobile USA to charge for bills. Sound Off!

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