If you’re an AT&T FirstNet customer and suddenly get hit with a $6,200 charge, the good news is that it’s probably a mistake and can be corrected. But actually getting the wrong charge wiped out might not be so easy.
This has now happened at least twice. In December 2024, a Texas police officer received a $6,223 bill with a $6,194 charge for using 3.1GB of data. He said he had unlimited data but was charged incorrectly after moving a line to AT&T’s FirstNet service for first responders. He called AT&T and went to an AT&T store but only got the bill reversed after contacting the AT&T president’s office.
An AT&T spokesperson told Ars at the time that it was “investigating to determine what caused this system error.” But AT&T never revealed exactly what caused it, and now another FirstNet user has gone through an almost identical ordeal.
On Monday this week, an active-duty military member from Florida emailed us and said he was “experiencing the exact same issue with AT&T.” The man, who preferred that we not publish his name, showed us a bill with a $6,196 charge for about 3.1GB of data use.
$2 per megabyte
The bill stated he had FirstNet Unlimited service from January 19 to February 14. There was also a note of a service change on January 19 and a charge for “FN Data PPU 3,098MB at $2.00 per MB,” adding up to $6,196. This was almost identical to the Texas man’s December 2024 bill that had a $6,194 line item listed as “Data Pay Per use 3,097MB at $2.00 per MB.”
We contacted AT&T on Tuesday with details about the Florida military member’s bill. We asked AT&T if it ever figured out what caused the similar billing problem in December 2024, whether it made any changes to prevent it from happening again, and for details on the cause of the new error.
AT&T didn’t answer our specific questions, but it fixed the bill within a couple of hours. “This was a big relief,” the FirstNet customer told us later that day, saying that AT&T “knocked it out completely today off of my bill.”
While AT&T didn’t tell us what came of the December 2024 investigation or explain why the new problem happened, it gave us a vague statement about the latest incident yesterday.
“We strive to deliver an excellent experience for every customer and to make things right when something unexpected occurs,” AT&T said. “We understand how alarming and stressful a bill of this size can be, especially when it doesn’t align with what a customer anticipated. We apologized to the customer and quickly addressed their billing concerns.” This week’s statement was similar to the one issued in December 2024, except that this time AT&T didn’t mention any plan to investigate the billing error.
AT&T FirstNet promises “hassle-free” billing, big savings
The AT&T spokesperson also told Ars that customers with questions about their bill should contact the carrier at 1-800-331-0500. This is just AT&T’s general support number for wireless service, so it isn’t exactly an emergency hotline that will get you immediate results, or even a specific number for FirstNet customers. The actual contact number for FirstNet customer service is 1-800-574-7000.
AT&T, which received billions from the government to build FirstNet, says the public safety network gives first responders and essential workers “reliable 5G connectivity that never competes with commercial traffic—no throttling ever,” along with “hassle-free” billing, “dedicated US-based support,” and savings of up to 20 percent on AT&T family plans.
AT&T advertises FirstNet as offering unlimited talk, text, and data plans starting at $42.99 per month per line. Even where there are data allowances, the FirstNet website says that extra data is supposed to cost $10 for each gigabyte—much less than the $2-per-megabyte charge imposed on the unlucky customers who got $6,200 bills. Since both of those customers’ bills described usage of about 3.1GB, the charge would have been $31 if a $10-per-gigabyte rate was applied.
AT&T never specified where the $2-per-megabyte amount came from, but it might be a charge from somewhere else in the AT&T system that was wrongly applied in these cases. AT&T legal terms for “other charges applicable to wireless services” specify that pay-per-use rates for data use in the US are “up to $2 per MB.”
