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News tagged: AT&T


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AT&T has quietly jacked up the company's arbitrary "administrative fee" on wireless customer bills to $1.99 from 76 cents, BTIG Research analyst Walter Piecyk noticed on Wednesday. With 64.5 million regular monthly customers likely to pay the fee, AT&T's change nets the company an additional $1 billion annually for doing absolutely nothing differently. Such fees are routinely used by ISPs to help them falsely advertise one lower rate, then hit users with a higher rate once their bill actually comes due.

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AT&T, in a statement, pretends this is just business as usual (and in the sense that misleading consumers is usual, they're right).

“This is a standard administrative fee across the wireless industry, which helps cover costs we incur for items like cell site maintenance and interconnection between carriers," the company says of the errant charge.

But things like "cell site maintenance" and "interconnection" are just a part of doing business, and should be included in the above-the-line price. This practice of false advertising and covertly jacking up rates via bogus fees is now standard operating procedure in the telecom sector, and you'd be hard pressed to find a regulator or politician from either party that has historically given much of a damn.

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The Intercept this week offers up a fairly amazing report offering more hard details on how AT&T routinely helps the NSA and other intelligence organizations spy on Americans. The report, which piggybacks on revelations made by AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, notes how AT&T uses eight "wiretap rooms" (including the San Francisco one identified by Klein and the one location at AT&T's secretive building in Manhattan) to routinely pass data to the NSA.

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AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon lobbyists are working in concern to try and weaken California's tough new net neutrality law before it can pass through the state legislature. California State Senator Scott Wiener's SB 822 was recently approved by the California Senate Energy Committee and now moves on to the Judiciary Committee.

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Users in our VoIP tech chat discuss how the FCC has levied a historic $120 million fine against Adrian Abramovich, a Florida man who is charged with making nearly 100 million spoofed robocalls in just three months. The FCC's second-largest fine in history ($95 million) was levied against a robocalling operation last August for allegedly making about one-fifth as many phone calls. Despite these and other actions (including a robocalling "strike force" headed by AT&T), robocalling continues to only grow, with a recent report claiming that AT&T and T-Mobile customers see the greatest volume of the annoying calls.

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AT&T's latest earnings report indicates that holding on to traditional pay TV subscribers continues to be a challenge for the company. AT&T's IPTV (U-verse) platform saw just 1,000 subscriber additions during the first quarter, but overall its traditional TV subscriber base saw a 10% decline from the first quarter of 2017.

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The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into whether AT&T, Verizon and the GSM Alliance (GSMA) industry standards group may have colluded to make switching cell phone carriers more difficult. Six anonymous sources tell the New York Times that the inquiry was launched back in February to determine if the nation's two biggest carriers had colluded with the industry standards body to hamstring the development of eSIM, a technology that's supposed to make it much easier to switch carriers in a matter of seconds.

The investigation was launched roughly five months ago after "at least one device maker and one wireless carrier" (possibly T-Mobile?) filed formal complaints with the Justice Department, insiders told the Times.

Carriers like AT&T and Verizon have increasingly been losing subscribers to T-Mobile, thanks to more consumer friendly policies ranging from cheaper international roaming to the elimination of hidden fees and long-term contracts.

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By 2021, consumers could be paying an extra $571 million a year in TV fees if AT&T is allowed to finalize its $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. That's according to an economist testifying for the DOJ in its case against AT&T's latest planned megamerger.

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While defending its $86 billion merger with Time Warner this week in court, AT&T unveiled it offered 1,000 of its competitors a deal. According to the Washington Post, AT&T sent those 1,000 competitors a letter with an offer: if they supported AT&T's merger, AT&T promised to send any price disputes with other cable companies to an outside arbitration process.

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AT&T's not having much luck trying to dodge multiple lawsuits over covertly throttling its wireless customers, then lying about it. If you recall, back in October of 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for the company's now well-established war on the company's grandfathered unlimited data users.

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When AT&T, Verizon and Comcast lobbied the Trump FCC to ignore the public and kill net neutrality last fall, they also convinced the FCC to include language banning states from protecting consumers in the wake of FCC apathy on privacy and net neutrality. And, as these ISPs expected, more than half the states in the country have now introduced some form of net neutrality rules in a direct challenge to the FCC and its newfound BFFs at major broadband duopolies, either in the form of legislation or executive orders preventing states from doing business with anti-competitive ISPs.

But as it turns out, neither FCC boss Ajit Pai or the ISPs he's pandering to were as clever as they thought they were.

Legal experts and many state lawyers have been pointing out that when the FCC ruled to roll back its classification of ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Telecom Act (which gave the FCC the authority it needed to enforce the rules), it also obliterated its authority to dictate or hamstring state-level protections.

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As the DOJ and AT&T prepare to square off in court over AT&T's planned $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner, government officials continue to paint an ugly picture of the harm the deal could do to American consumers and the overall TV market. Consumer advocates have long stated that AT&T already has a long history of anti-competitive behavior, and letting it grow larger will only result in higher prices for consumers as AT&T inevitably tries to drive up costs for streaming companies looking to compete with AT&T's own video services.

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