Little Phone, Big Bill

Apple has a whole section of its web site dedicated to its socially responsible commitment to the environment. If you buy something in one of its stores these days, they might even skip the paper receipt entirely and e-mail you a purchase record instead.

Which is why it's so surprising that customers of its iPhone are hearing their phone bills land on their front stoops with a THUD. It seems that AT&T, which is Apple's exclusive service provider, includes a separate line item in its bills not only for every call and text message, but for every single time a user accesses the Internet or sends an e-mail.

"It's 60 pages of nothingness," says Alan Klein, partner of a Macintosh consulting firm called Techmuscle. "How many trees had to die for this statement?"

Klein wants a paper record of his phone calls, but that only takes 13 pages of his most recent bill. Pages 14 through 61 are filled with the same data transfer line items over and over, all at zero cost. (The data access is unlimited; each item merely says "data transfer," without any detail of what type of data was transferred.)

Over at the blog Gizmodo, blogger Justine goes through the bill she received in a box from AT&T. That's right. A box. She thinks the postage was around $7 to mail her 300-page bill.

AT&T says it includes each data transfer item because some people want to see them, says Mark Siegel, a company spokesman. Customers can choose another bill option, which summarizes the total costs without any detail of the calls made.

While there are no plans to change the default billing style, Siegel says AT&T is "looking at a variety of options."

At the end of the bill, if anyone actually reads that far, the phone company has an announcement to make. "The New AT&T is going green."

We're sure Apple would be proud.

by Megan Barnett

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