AT&T has billed a second FirstNet customer roughly $6,196 for approximately 3.1GB of data — a charge of $2 per megabyte — after a nearly identical billing error struck a Texas police officer in December 2024.
The latest case involves an active-duty military member from Florida who contacted the publication Monday. His bill showed a FirstNet Unlimited service period from January 19 to February 14, with a line item reading “FN Data PPU 3,098MB at $2.00 per MB.” The December bill carried a near-matching entry: “Data Pay Per use 3,097MB at $2.00 per MB,” totaling $6,194.
After the outlet contacted AT&T Tuesday with details of the Florida case, the carrier corrected the bill within hours. “This was a big relief,” the customer said, adding that AT&T “knocked it out completely today off of my bill.”
No Explanation, No Hotline
The company declined to answer whether it ever identified the cause of the December error, whether it made any changes afterward, or what produced the new charge. Its statement offered no specifics: “We strive to deliver an excellent experience for every customer and to make things right when something unexpected occurs.”
Notably, the December statement included a reference to an ongoing investigation. This week’s version did not.
The Texas officer’s path to resolution was considerably harder — he called AT&T, visited a store, and ultimately had to contact the AT&T president’s office before the $6,223 bill was reversed.
When asked for a customer contact number, AT&T pointed to its general wireless support line, 1-800-331-0500, rather than the dedicated FirstNet customer service number, 1-800-574-7000.
What FirstNet Is Supposed to Cost
FirstNet, which AT&T built with government funding, is marketed to first responders and essential workers with promises of unlimited plans starting at $42.99 per line per month, “hassle-free” billing, and savings of up to 20 percent on family plans.
Where data allowances do apply, the FirstNet website states that overages cost $10 per gigabyte. At that rate, the 3.1GB used by both customers would have generated a charge of roughly $31 — not $6,196.
AT&T‘s own legal terms for wireless services do list pay-per-use data rates in the US at “up to $2 per MB,” suggesting the charge may have been pulled from a different part of the company’s billing system and applied incorrectly in both cases. The company has not confirmed this or offered any alternative explanation.
Both errors appeared after a line was moved to FirstNet service — a pattern AT&T has acknowledged only with a vague reference to a “system error” in December, a description it has not repeated since.
Photo by javzandulam Bold on Unsplash
This article is a curated summary based on third-party sources. Source: Read the original article
