If you’re AT&T cellphone customer on a messaging plan and you like to send pictures, check your bills. After noticing he was getting overcharged for sending pictures, reader Robert says an AT&T CSR told him that AT&T is having a nationwide computer glitch that could be overcharging you too…

My bill is always $57 a month for my Cellphone. That includes the $4.99 200 message plan and the $5.00 unlimited messaging to AT&T customers. This includes IM, TXT and MMS messages. Starting last month, whenever I sent a MMS picture message, I would be charged pay per use data for sending the picture. Last month it was a charge of $3.61 at $.01 per KB. I thought it was from sending too big of pictures so I sent lower resolution ones as a test. I was still being charged and its now up to almost $10 range.

I called AT&T today and talked with a CSR. I explained how I’ve had the same plan since may. She looked, and after a few minutes finally began to understand what I was talking about. She cleared the charges for last months bill, but It looks like I’m going to have to call again this month. She said she noted on the account what was going on, and my concerns about the charges. She then informed me of this. She said that AT&T is experiencing a Nationwide Computer Glitch in their data billing system which is unable to tell the difference between MMS messages and data. Both data and MMS go over the wap.cingular.com network (for former Cingular customers at least) and you are required to have at least a Pay-Per-Use data plan in order to recieve and send MMS messages. The charges, oddly enough, only charge for sending MMS, not recieving MMS. Which is odd because they both use the medianet service.

I would have never noticed this charge since they just stopped sending itemized paper bills. It’s kind of odd that they just started that last month, and last month was when their “billing glitch” began.

(Photo: epicharmus)

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