Pajama Entrepreneur

David Pogue writes in the New York Times tech blog about this first AT&T bill for the iPhone. Of course it’s filled with the usual unintelligible telco jargon:

It’s a staggeringly, hatefully complex document, designed by some Monty Pythoneseque committee in charge of consumer confusion . . . I get SIX PAGES of listings of data tidbits that the iPhone has downloaded in the form of email and Web pages–KILOBYTE BY KILOBYTE! Every graphic on every Web page, every message sent or received–it’s all carefully listed by date and time. Not as anything helpful like NYTIMES.COM HOME PAGE or EMAIL–no, no. Instead, every single one of the hundreds of listings says the same thing: “Data Transfer” of type “Data” at rate code “MBRF,” along with how many kilobytes it was (usually 1K or 3K).

This is exactly what happens when you have a business based on billing by the kilobyte (a telco) attempting to deliver Internet access on an “unlimited” data plan.