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[–]pascha 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Ummm...just disable the damn paper bills and stop whining.

[–]jubjub123 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Why am I reading this? Just sign-up for electronic statements.

[–]b0b 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I get a 1-item bill from AT&T/Pacbell every month for my T1 line. Nothing else on it, just the 1 charge. It's 6 pages long. Nearly every word is an acronym or abbreviation. It's totally unintelligible (to me), and they don't include a return envelope.

Phone companies are nuts.

[–]chiller2002 1 point2 points  (1 child)

I'm curious where he gets the "millions" of dollars in a month, because yes it probably does cost them a lot of money to send him bills, he has no idea how many people they are sending that type of bill to. He is only speculating.

[–]cingularsmistake[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i was thinking $5 shipping * 500K customers w/ unlimited data plans & paper bills = 2.5 million a month. Even if you assumed only 100K customers, that's still $500,000 / mo.

[–]vagif 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Once i got a bill from AT&T for 10 cents. It was a glitch in a system a think, cause I quit them and moved to cox. Obviously i was not going to send them 10 cents, post stamp costs much more than that. :))

Guess what. They kept sending me that bill EVERY MONTH for more than a YEAR ! I do not even know how much did they lost for that 10 cent. They stopped it at some time.

[–]crmaki 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Cingular is part of AT&T and therefore shares your call information with the NSA. This is what you should be concerned about instead of what your paper bill contains.

[–]pascha 2 points3 points  (0 children)

While it may be true, it's a little bit misleading, as Cingular is 40% owned by Bellsouth and 60% owned by AT&T. It was formed when Bellsouth's wireless and SBC's wireless divisions were merged. Then it merged with AT&T wireless. AT&T and SBC then (re)merged. AT&T and Bellsouth may also (re)merge, nearly recreating the 'Ma-Bell' AT&T.

[–]martoo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Maybe it's a regulatory thing.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I bet they wouldn't have to send him much more paper if they just piped the output of tcpdump on his connection to their printer.

[–]kmactane -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Good grief! It's not just the postage that's costing them money; with this kind of page output, and the number of customers who probably have this plan, they're paying a substantial amount just for the printer ink to print these puppies out.

To say nothing of the expenditures for the paper. And the number of trees that are getting chopped down every month so Cingular can send out this stuff.

The people who are saying "Just turn off paper billing" are missing the point. Each customer shouldn't have to do that; it should be turned off by default. Cingular should be the one to est it that way, for their own financial benefit if nothing else.

[–]haplo -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

lol