AT&T Ripoff - comments

A couple of recent commenters on my post about AT&T ripping off American soldiers in Iraq have mistakenly compared the $.21/minute AT&T is charging troops to call home with the rate on calls TO Iraq.  Phone rates are not symetrical.

One commenter notes that the SkypeOut rate TO Iraq is thirty euro cents.  However, the SkypeOut rate to the US is two Euro cents from ANYWHERE including Iraq.

You can find high phone rates anywhere.  For example, I just paid $1.50/min for a credit card to the US because I was in a hurry.  Then I found a hotspot I can get on for $10.95/day and made a series of SkypeOut calls to the US for the two euro cents a minute.

I have a choice.  The troops in Iraq don't.  I wouldn't presume to tell AT&T what to charge if the soldiers had a choice and AT&T didn't have a monopoly on PX payphones in Iraq and Afghanistan.  If AT&T, itself, thinks its rates are reasonable, all it has to do is open the payphones to competitive calling cards as it would be required to do in the US.

Comments

[fred]

my son a disable vet. is being sued by AT&T for
outstanding phone bill, is there any group
or organization fighting is company?

[jenny]

Let's see, we already have a list of prepaid cards that are cheaper than AT&T but not allowed to be used on AT&T phones. We can see where several people have done the research on the international calling rates, and we have seen many times on the news how haliburton and other "no bid" contracts are being used to bleed the american taxpayer and more importantly the soldiers dry. Somehow I can't help but believe that the odds of AT&T doing anything out of the goodness of their heart is greater than the odds of Elvis returning. Twenty years ago I may have believed this, but not today.

[jenny]

I am not surprised that AT&T is ripping off the soldiers at all. They ripoff all of their customers every chance they get. Getting a response or decent help from AT&T is nearly impossible as they have outsourced their services to India. Making a profit is not a bad thing, making a profit by monopolizing, lying, double billing, and being inaccessible for customer service is called greed. Personally I am searching for new company to take all of my business too.

[Mike Swedenberg]

We have a solution to the AT&T phone card rates. We are liquidating inventory of 100,000 $10 AT&T domestic long distance cards that can be used on Military bases and AT&T phone tents globally for $1.15 each. (About 2 cents a minute) They include 67 minutes with a 5 unit (minute) payphone connect charge. Supporters of Operation Gratitude are buying the cards and donating them to be included in Holiday gift packages.

[andy]

then you found the wrong callback service - some can be triggered by a trigger DID, sending sms, webforms (incl wap version) or all of these

Iraq 0.090 USD
Iraq - Baghdad 0.059 USD
Iraq - Mobile 0.169 USD
- add on the US rate of 1.5c

[Anonymous Coward]

One group doing something for the soldiers is this one:

http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com

[DG Lewis]

Without seeing the contract, it's impossible to know how "fair" or "unfair" this is. AT&T is bearing cost for putting payphones in Iraq and maintaining them, in addition to the networking cost. I would suspect it's not cheap. Neither you nor I know how much AT&T is getting paid by the government to put the payphones there, nor whether that covers their cost.

It's possible that AT&T got a Halliburton-type no-bid contract and is getting 40% return on its cost of installing and maintaining the payphones, and is taking advantage of "our poor brave soldiers" by charging them an exorbitant rate of 21 cents a minute.

It's also possible that AT&T, in a spirit of goodwill and national service (which, you have to admit, AT&T has often shown in the past) put in the payphones at or below cost and figured it could recover the balance of the cost on the minutes.

It's also possible that 21 cents a minute is actually a competitive rate. Let's do some research on international calling card rates from Iraq to the US, based on a couple of Google searches:

The World Traveler card: 56.25 cents per minute.

The Connect Home card: 45 cents per minute

The Continental, Callback, and Vivaldi cards range from 9.2 to 38.65 cents per minute -- but they are callback services that can only be used with call origination from a web interface.

So two competitive international calling card providers listed first on Google show prices from two to two and a half times as much as AT&T's "ripoff" rates; the only cheaper rates are for international callback services, which generally don't work from payphones.

What was the problem again?