Tag: telecommunications
Sprint And Verizon Wireless Customers In Line For Refunds After Settlements

Sprint And Verizon Wireless Customers In Line For Refunds After Settlements

By Paul Muschick, The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) (TNS)

Sprint Corp. and Verizon Wireless have agreed to refund customers to settle national investigations alleging they allowed their billing systems to be used by other companies that “crammed” unauthorized charges onto customers’ bills.

Sprint and Verizon will pay a total of $158 million in refunds and fines under settlements with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Communications Commission and the attorneys general of all states.

“Cramming is a deceptive practice that exploits consumers,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane said in a statement. “It is particularly insidious because consumers are charged for services they never ordered.”

Verizon will pay $90 million and Sprint will pay $68 million. Of those amounts, Verizon will pay $70 million in customer refunds and Sprint will pay $50 million. The rest of the money will be paid to state and federal authorities.

How much each customer may receive will be determined case-by-case. The settlements are pending approval in federal court. You can reach the Verizon settlement administrator by phone at 888-726-7063 and the Sprint settlement administrator at 877-389-8787.

Cramming occurs when a company uses your mobile or landline phone bill like a credit card and adds charges for services such as trivia, ringtones and horoscopes that you didn’t agree to. The phone companies benefit because they are paid by the other companies to provide billing services.

“The lack of oversight by Sprint and Verizon allowed the vendors to have nearly unfettered access to consumers’ wireless accounts,” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a statement. “The billing systems for premium messages attracted and enabled unscrupulous merchants who, in some cases, only needed consumers’ phone numbers to cram illegitimate charges onto wireless bills.”

Customers can get charged by responding to vague spam text messages or emails, or by clicking on ads that ask you to enter your cell phone number. Charges can be one-time or occur every month. The amounts can vary and often are vaguely defined and hard to identify on bills, which is why you should check your bills closely each month.

T-Mobile and AT&T entered similar nationwide settlements last year. All four major mobile carriers no longer bill customers for “premium” subscription text message services.

Paul Muschick of The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.) helps consumers fight errors, incompetence and arrogance by businesses, governments and institutions.

(c)2015 The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Mike Mozart via Flickr

Amtrak’s Spectrum Gap

Amtrak’s Spectrum Gap

In the public eye, the disaster on the rails last week in Philadelphia was not only tragic but also shocking. As a crowded Amtrak train approached a bend in the track, it was barreling along at more than 100 miles an hour — twice the mandated speed for that section. The resulting derailment killed eight people, highlighting grave deficiencies in Amtrak’s safety system.

But while Amtrak officials may have been devastated, they could not have been surprised: The accident confirmed clear vulnerabilities in the safety system, shortcomings that the rail company’s internal watchdog had been warning about for more than two years.

In a December 2012 report, Amtrak’s inspector general wrote that “formidable” and “significant challenges” were delaying deployment of a safety system known as Positive Train Control, which identifies cars that are traveling at excessive speeds and automatically slows their progress. Four years earlier, Congress had required that Amtrak and other American rail companies add the technology to their operations, but only a fraction of the rail systems were by then covered. Had the PTC technology been in place in Philadelphia, federal regulators say, the derailment might well have been prevented.

The inspector general’s 2012 report zeroed in on one missing element that was crucial to the broader deployment of the safety system: Amtrak had for years failed to acquire adequate rights to broadcast communications signals through the public airwaves. Without these so-called spectrum rights, Amtrak’s trains could not communicate with the electronic brains of the safety system, preventing its use along key stretches of track. This lack of spectrum had become the “most serious challenge” in the railroad’s efforts to deploy the safety equipment more broadly, Amtrak’s watchdog warned.

The failure to more quickly address this challenge seems like a story that the political world can oversimplify into a standard tale of cut-and-dry blame, featuring singular villains. But in this saga, many factors appear to have contributed to the disaster.

For one, there was a lack of adequate resources. Flush with profits, private freight companies had the cash to buy the spectrum they needed for their own PTC system. By contrast, Congress did not provide Amtrak with the same resources.

There was also a lack of political will. When public transportation officials begged Congress to pass a bill ordering the FCC to give the railroad unused spectrum for free rather than selling it to private telecommunications firms, lawmakers refused.

But some technology experts argue that Amtrak itself was also to blame for doggedly sticking to an outdated plan. They say that because communications technology has advanced so quickly, the railroad officials did not need to build a PTC system on exclusive spectrum — whose scarcity makes it difficult and expensive to obtain. Instead, they assert, new technologies would have allowed Amtrak to more quickly construct a system using shared spectrum, existing telecommunications infrastructure or even unlicensed frequencies that are used for things like in-home wi-fi.

“We have boatloads of fiber running alongside train tracks in the rights of way,” said Harold Feld, a senior vice president of the think tank Public Knowledge. “If I were architecting this system, I could deploy it tomorrow using unlicensed spectrum.” Amtrak’s “obsession with exclusive licensing kills,” he concluded.

How much each of these factors contributed to the catastrophe can certainly be debated. What is not debatable, however, is the existence of warning signs. The 2012 inspector general report proves they were there for all to see.

That, then, raises two pressing questions: Why were those warning signs not more urgently addressed? And will such warning signs be acted on in the future? America deserves answers.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising, and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. 

Photo: Loco Steve via Flickr

Smartphone ‘Kill Switch’ Bill Passes California Senate Vote On Second Try

Smartphone ‘Kill Switch’ Bill Passes California Senate Vote On Second Try

By Jessica Calefati, San Jose Mercury News

SACRAMENTO, California—Several weeks after voting to squash a bill that would require anti-theft technology in all California cell phones, the state Senate Thursday morning voted to advance the “kill switch” bill.

The legislation got a second chance when Sen. Mark Leno, a Democrat, asked his colleagues to reconsider Senate Bill 962 with technical amendments that give manufacturers more time to comply with the new rules and clarify that the bill does not apply to tablets.

“We have a crime wave on our hands,” Leno said of the many cell phone thefts in the Bay Area. “We are trying to keep our constituents safe on their streets and in their neighborhoods. That’s why we’re here today.”

Although the proposal has drawn fierce opposition from the telecommunications industry, Leno said Thursday morning that Apple and Microsoft, two of the largest cell phone manufacturers, had removed their opposition to the bill.

A few of the Democrats who initially cast no votes against the proposal, including Sen. Jim Beall, also changed their minds and voted in favor of the bill Thursday morning. Beall thanked Leno for addressing his concerns about the bill’s consequences for Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.

“I applaud the senator for making these amendments,” Beall said. “He’s listening to the tech community.”

Leno says the bill is needed as a crime deterrent. Cell phone thefts, he said, are becoming more prevalent and more dangerous.

Law enforcement officials have called thefts of smartphones an “epidemic” in some of California’s largest cities. In San Francisco, more than half of all robberies involve cell phone snatching, and in Oakland, that figure is as high as 75 percent.

Nevertheless, a powerful telecommunications trade group called CTIA-The Wireless Association continues to oppose the bill and issued a terse statement Thursday morning, accusing the state Senate of stifling innovation by embracing the kill switch bill.

“We’ve rolled out stolen phone databases, consumer education campaigns, anti-theft apps and features and most recently a ‘Smartphone Anti-Theft Voluntary Commitment,’ which provides a uniform national technology solution,” said Jamie Jastings, vice president of external and state affairs for CTIA. “If technology mandates are imposed on a state-by-state basis, the uniformity is threatened.”

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Photo: Mark Mathosian via Flickr

E.U. Reform To Scrap Mobile Roaming Fees

E.U. Reform To Scrap Mobile Roaming Fees

Brussels (AFP) — The European Parliament on Thursday endorsed a sweeping package of European Union telecommunications reforms, including a much-awaited measure to end roaming charges for cross-border mobile phone use.

A plenary sitting of parliament in Brussels voted to ban mobile phone surcharges which hit users as they cross national borders in the E.U. — a ban to take effect by December 2015.

If enacted, the legislation would require mobile phone companies to offer “roam like at home” packages to cover the whole of the E.U., or allow customers to subscribe to separate service providers without changing their original SIM card.

The vote was welcomed by E.U. Commissioner for the digital agenda Neelie Kroes, who has been fighting for the reforms in a bid to dismantle roadblocks lying in the way of a common telecommunications market.

“This is what the E.U. is all about –- getting rid of barriers to make life easier and less expensive,” Kroes said.

The legislation, which covers both phone calls and data transmission, now needs the approval of the European Council, representing the E.U.’s 28 member states, before returning to parliament after the European elections in late May.

Commission officials said they were confident the legislation could be enacted by October.

Europe’s telecommunications industry reacted angrily to the vote, claiming it was a “step in the wrong direction” and one which would harm the E.U.’s business competitiveness.

Luigi Gambardella, chairman of telecommunications operators group ETNO, said the vote risked “derailing the original objectives” of the E.U.’s ambitious digital reform project and could undermine job creation.

In particular, ETNO objected to another part of the legislative reforms requiring that internet service providers (ISPs) grant all services available on the net equal access — an idea known as “net neutrality.”

If enacted, the reforms would prevent ISPs from blocking access to certain sites, or slowing download speeds for customers wanting to log on to those sites — a practice which some ISPs have used to damage competing services.

But ISPs argue that such restrictions would see bandwidth otherwise earmarked for e-education or telemedicine lost to recreational bandwith use.

Gambardella called on E.U. member states to reject this part of the legislation or face the prospect that access “to innovative and high-quality services will be negatively affected.”

The reform bill was launched in September by the European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, in an attempt to create a single telecoms market and boost competition among largely nationally based mobile phone companies.

©afp.com/Indranil Mukherjee