New York – About 4.7 million Cingular Wireless subscribers with older phones will have to pay $5 extra each month as the company tries to prod them to get new handsets so it can devote its entire network to one type of signal.
The new surcharge, unique among major U.S. carriers, will be added to bills starting in September, the company said Monday.
Cingular, jointly owned by prospective merger partners AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp., reported in July that roughly 92 percent of its 57.3 million customers use phones based on the globally dominant technology Global System for Mobile.
The rest have handsets based on one of two older technologies: the first generation of mobile phones that used an analog, or nondigital, signal to transmit calls, and the second that uses a digital transmission technique known as Time Division Multiple Access.
The new fee, which will generate $23.5 million a month for Cingular, adds to a confusing array of surcharges and government taxes that, regardless of the wireless company, can boost the average cellular bill by up to 50 percent from the advertised rate.
Like other U.S. cellular carriers, Cingular is required by the Federal Communications Commission to keep providing analog service until early 2008 as long as it still has customers with those phones.
