Suit: AT&T overbills for iPhone, iPad data

AT&T allegedly overcharges for data use on iPhones and iPads, and bills for "phantom data traffic when there is no actual data usage initiated by the customer," according to a class-action suit against the Dallas company.

Citing what court documents claim was a two-month study of AT&T's billing practices by an independent consulting firm, the suit makes the following claims:

• 
  
• AT&T bills "systematically overstate Web server traffic by 7 percent to 14 percent, and some cases by over 300 percent." That essentially means overcharges could be anywhere from 7 percent to 300 percent, the suit says.
• 
  
• AT&T "bills for phantom data traffic when there is no actual data usage initiated by the customer."
• 
  
• The consulting firm's tests "also show that AT&T's billing system does not accurately record the time and date at which data usage occurs, which often causes charges to be posted on the wrong billing cycle."

The suit, filed in January in federal district court in Oakland, Calif., seeks unspecified damages. AT&T has denied any wrongdoing.

"We properly charge for all data that our customers send and receive, including data activity that runs in the background on smartphones and other powerful data devices," said Mark Siegel, an AT&T spokesman, in an email. "Accurate billing is clearly important and, unfortunately, there have been some incorrect claims about our data usage billing practices."

Data usage for emailing, downloading applications, browsing the Web, downloading a video or streaming music is all applied to a customers’ data plan, Siegel's email said. So are real-time updates to applications, such as weather updates, sports scores or stock tickers.

"Particularly for smartphones, tablets and other advanced mobile devices, applications are often constantly running in the background and engaged with our network," Siegel's email said. "And AT&T captures your data activity nightly to create a bill record in our systems. This will appear on your bill to be a late night 'charge,' but in fact, the time stamp reflects the time that your device established a connection to the network, not the time that you sent or received data."

AT&T is among the top patent winners in Austin, coming in at No. 4 last year with about 77 issued, according to Austin Business Journal research.

Read more: Suit: AT&T overbills for iPhone, iPad data | Austin Business Journal