T-Mobile's plan to charge $1.50 a month for paper bills has been trashed, due to complaints from consumers regulating agencies.
The charge that could have netted T-Mobile millions a month, raised concerned from consumer groups who claimed that seniors, disabled, and the poor could not pay their bills. It also caused privacy concerns from people who don't like to give out email and banking information.
NPR reported the change in service agreement could allow many T-Mobile subscribers to get out their contracts.
State regulatory agencies received
complaints over the proposed T-Mobile charges. New York State,
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo would "not sit back and
let a company change its prices under the guise of 'going green.'"
None
of the other major carriers including the greenest in the world
AT&T charge for paper bills. However all carriers charge $3.49 for
full-detail bills.
Some problems with only online billing is
that emails can be lost and consumers may not be able to connect to the
Internet all the time.
T-Mobile posted on its website:
"Since the announcement we've heard everything from kudos to concerns
about the move to paperless--especially from our customers who today
are receiving paper bills at no charge. So we've
decided to not charge our customers a paper bill fee for now. Instead,
we'll be taking more time to determine the fairest way possible to
encourage people to go paperless."
Mailing out paper statements is really unnecessary for the vast majority of these customers-- that is, those who are already paying electronically by going to the website or signing up for automatic payments instead of writing a paper check every month. These are the people who have no excuse for keeping their paper bill, particularly when they check the details online anyway.
These people need to be motivated to turn off their paper billing, and this has definitely done just that--- paperless billing went up to about 33,000 from 1,000 following the paper billing fee.