In a bit of news that doesn’t surprise me much, a new study from BillShrink finds that a quarter million U.S. users are paying too much for their wireless service because they miscalculate how much voice, data and text messages they use per month.
The report found that people waste about $336 per year. Part this is because many users are buying plans that don’t fit their needs and this is giving AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon about an extra $79 million per year.
“Despite the best efforts from the FCC and the carriers to create transparency in wireless fees, we’ve found that people are becoming even more confused about how to right-size their cell phone plans,” said Schwark Satyavolu, co-founder and CEO of BillShrink. “While tiered pricing creates more choice, it makes it paramount for people to accurately assess their phone usage. Even though data usage is surging, the majority of wireless customers are still throwing away money by getting plans with too much data capacity.”
Is this really the carriers’ faults though? It’s very easy to cast the blame on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon because, well, no one really likes their carrier. Whether it’s outrageous overseas charges or overpriced text messages many users have felt the dreaded bill shock.
I also think that AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon should do a better job of providing monitoring tools for end users. Sure, voice and text messages are pretty much cut and dry but the recent Windows Phone 7 bug showed that the data reporting could still use some work.
Some AT&T Windows Phone 7 users were reporting large chunks of data being sent overnight. While the culprit was eventually found out to be how the Yahoo Mail client interacts with the platform, many users were upset by how the data showed up as one chunk, usually at a time when they know they weren’t using data.
The problem is that AT&T doesn’t provide granularity on how it reports data usage to users. Your bill may say you used 70 MB at 2 a.m. but that could be the aggregate for the last day or two. Getting better data reporting could help clear that up.
Check out BillShrink’s inforgraphic comparing the different plans.
