July 4, 2000
Consumer Complaints - Enforcement Division
Common Carrier Bureau
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th St. S.W.,
Washington, D. C. 20554
Re: Dispute with AT&T
I am asking you to help me resolve a dispute between me and AT&T.
I made four international calls to Taiwan between 11 May 2000 and 2 June 2000 totaling 25 minutes. I was charged by AT&T at two "basic" rates of $2.92 and $1.77 per minute for a grand total of $58.05. To no avail I have called AT&T three times to negotiate my bill down to a reasonable amount.
I contend that I have never agreed to such high rates. Here are my four contentions in detail.
1. I have never agreed to pay AT&T’s "basic" rates for these calls. AT&T claims that anybody who signs up with AT&T domestic long distance are automatically signed up with the basic rate for international calls. The fact is that, neither I nor AT&T have any verbal, written or printed record that I had explicitly and knowingly agreed to pay basic rates.
2. The basic rates are not published. AT&T claims that it charges me according to its "published" basic rates. To the contrary, these rates were never made available to me, not over the telephone, not on paper and not at www.att.com. Nor are these rates available on the telephone menu at the number listed on my phone bill: 1-800-222-0300.
When I dial the above number, I get a myriad of menus, none of which explains the basic rates for international calls. Furthermore, the telephone menu system does not explain how one may contact an AT&T service representative. (Through trial and error, one manages to reach a real person by repeatedly choosing invalid or non-existent menu options).
As you can see, AT&T clearly has not and does not want to make these basic rates accessible to the public, in particular, to its customers. In fact, AT&T has purposely hidden these rates.
3. The basic rates are arbitrary. One of AT&T’s representatives said that $2.32 (not $2.92 or $17.7) per minute was the basic rate when I signed up. Not realizing that I had been charged at two different rates, namely "standard" and "economy", she divided $58.05 by 25 minutes to obtain this $2.32 per minute rate. The implications are that, (a) in fact, the basic rates are arbitrarily chosen at the time of billing rather than periodically published and (b) these rates are not known even to AT&T’s own service representatives.
4. The basic rates are unreasonably high. AT&T sells phone cards at rates of 14 cents per minute for international calls to Taiwan. Qwest publishes on its web site the rate of 19.6 cent per minute for direct-dial calls to Taiwan. AT&T’s basic rates of $2.92 and $1.77 are ten to twenty times higher. They are not reasonable.
I hope you can help me negotiate my phone bill down to a reasonable price. By reasonable, I mean a rate roughly equal to the average of rates advertised on television by the major carriers.