TelecomTV TelecomTV
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Events
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • DSP Leaders
  • Great Telco Debate
    • |
    • Follow
    • |
    • Subscribe
  • |
  • More
  • Webcasts
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Great Telco Debate
  • |
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • |
    • Subscribe
    • |
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Follow TelecomTV
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Help
  • Contact
  • Sign In Register Subscribe
    • Subscribe
    • Sign In
    • Register
  • Search

Telco & CSP

Telco & CSP

T-Mobile caught out being a carrier (welcome back)

Ian Scales
By Ian Scales

Jul 3, 2014

John Legere struts his stuff at CES14. By fanaticTRX (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

John Legere struts his stuff at CES14. By fanaticTRX (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

That’s the trouble with occupying the moral high ground  -  you make a good target and they’ll  get you in the cross-hairs eventually. Yes, it’s egg on face time for T-Mobile USA. The self-proclaimed ‘uncarrier’, has allegedly been caught out 'cramming' customers for premium SMS and the Federal Trade Commission (the FTC) is on the case. 

Cramming is where you allow (or worse, ‘cause’) items to appear on a customer’s bill that it neither wanted or ordered. The key here is the huge cut carriers (or even uncarriers) tend to take for things like premium services - up to 40 per cent of the proceeds of a premium SMS message, for instance.  That means it’s in line to make just as much as, let’s say, a fraudulent operation sending out unwanted high-cost messages.  

So the suspicion is that when such things happen the carrier concerned is incentivised to turn a blind eye, safe in the knowledge that it has so-called plausible deniability lined up should it all go public. If it doesn’t go public and refunds aren’t demanded then it stands to make a substantial wedge. (I have been caught out on this myself - apparently I took a trip to Morocco and made dozens of premium calls there - but that’s another story).  

The FTC says third parties were up to this old trick and that T-Mobile was aware of it but then obfuscated the billing so that customers couldn’t work out where the extra charges had crept into the equation. The FTC has filed a complaint that T-Mobile had been charging many of its customers $10 monthly for subscriptions to things like  ringtones, wallpaper, horoscopes and so on.
Similar things happened in the UK and other markets where children, especially, contracted the premium SMS services not understanding that the charges would keep on coming unless explicitly stopped - and that was sometimes easier said than done. In my opinion these episodes represented some of the worst chapters in the mobile industry’s short history.

As things have turned out in the US, T-Mobile dropped the premium SMS services last year since they were causing so much customer ill-will. Until then, it claims, the cramming was widely practised by all the carriers. Not much of an excuse, especially considering that active steps appear to have been taken by T-Mobile to make the  billing, lets say, non-transparent. Looks like T-Mobile is a carrier after all. Welcome back. 

Related Topics
  • Analysis & Opinion,
  • News,
  • Telco & CSP

More Like This

5G

Nokia and WEG Brazil launch Industry 4.0 project with 5G standalone private wireless

Mar 5, 2021

Digital Platforms & Services

DISH selects Amdocs’ cloud-native billing platform to support 5G services

Mar 5, 2021

Sustainability

Mobile broadband costs are keeping developing nations on the fringes of the global Internet economy

Mar 5, 2021

Security

Vodafone offers broadband with automatic 4G back-up

Mar 5, 2021

DSP Leaders

DSP Leaders World Forum 2021 – Preview

Mar 5, 2021

Email Newsletters

Stay up to date with the latest industry developments: sign up to receive TelecomTV's top news and videos plus exclusive subscriber-only content direct to your inbox – including our daily news briefing and weekly wrap.

Subscribe

Top Picks

Highlights of our content from across TelecomTV today

18:24

How Zoom evolved in the pandemic era

26:24

Red Hat and HPE discuss how to support open multi-vendor 5G network slices

14:28

How RADCOM is helping Rakuten Mobile run its innovative 5G network

8:33

Monetizing innovative telco edge services

  • TelecomTV
  • Decisive Media

TelecomTV is produced by the team at Decisive Media

Menu
  • News
  • Videos
  • Channels
  • Directory
  • Smart Studio
 
  • Surveys
  • Debates
  • Perspectives
  • Events
  • About Us
Our Brands
  • TelecomTV Tracker
  • TelecomTV Perspectives
  • DSP Leaders
  • DSP Leaders World Forum
  • The Great Telco Debate
Get In Touch
[email protected]
+44 (0) 207 448 1070

Request a Media Pack

Follow
  • © Decisive Media Limited 2021. All rights reserved. All brands and products are the trademarks of their respective holder(s).
  • Privacy
  • Terms
  • Legal Notices