Friday, August 14, 2026
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Opinion

Telecom Tweets of the Week: UK operators in hot water over device billing

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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Maybe being able to include the price of a handset in your monthly bill isn’t such a great thing — well, not if a carrier keeps right on billing you for the same amount after you’ve paid the device off, which is surprisingly common, according to numbers coming out of the United Kingdom.

Consumer group Citizens Advice found that “one in three customers on ‘handset-inclusive’ mobile phone contracts continue to pay beyond the minimum term of their contract,” the U.K. Telegraph reported. “While some providers will automatically reduce the cost of the monthly fee after the handset has effectively been paid off, others do not.” It reportedly can take citizens as long as six months to realize that their device billing is incorrect, by which time they’ve shelled out nearly $270 dollars extra — and more elderly customers are impacted by improper device billing than people under the age of 35, CA found. 

Government regulators are taking note, including the minister of digital:

Does the U.S. have a similar problem? I’m not sure how we’d even know.

Elsewhere in the Twitterverse, T-Mobile US CEO John Legere has never seen a Verizon quarterly call that he couldn’t snark on (before, during and after). A few selections:

In other shade: Qualcomm vs. Intel on chip size.

https://twitter.com/sherifhanna/status/920359092152971265

In a bright spot on mobile security, a new survey from CTIA finds that consumers are starting to think harder about how secure their smartphones and connections are, and adopting new behaviors.

Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure took a little trip down memory lane this week:

And for Friday fun: it’s not exactly rock ’em sock ’em robots, but it’s pretty close:

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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