Wireless firms make the call to nickel-and-dime customers

Cellphone customers gripe about being nickel-and-dimed to death by their wireless service providers. But guess what happens when you put all those nickels and dimes together?

You get a really huge chunk of change.

Since the beginning of the year, the four leading wireless companies -- Verizon, AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile -- have quietly raised a monthly fee that each charges to recoup some of their business costs.

Taken individually, the fee hikes represent pocket change for most people. AT&T's fee in California, for example, is up by 40 cents a month; Sprint's is 24 cents higher.

Combined, however, the wireless companies are looking at hundreds of millions of dollars in additional annual revenue. And that's with no significant change in their service to customers.

"We call these 'because they can' fees," said Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network, a San Diego advocacy group. "Every household is struggling right now to pay bills, and these companies put the squeeze on because they can."

California T-Mobile customers received an insert with their latest bill informing them that the company's "Regulatory Programs Fee" has risen to $1.21 a month from 86 cents.

The company explained that the fee "is not a tax but a fee we collect and retain to help us recover the costs associated with funding and complying with a variety of government mandates, programs and obligations."

In other words, T-Mobile is billing customers for its cost of following the government's rules -- rules that were put in place to make the company friendlier to customers.

Nice.

Better still, T-Mobile said that "these programs and the costs of compliance vary over time, as do the costs that T-Mobile includes." That's a nice way of ensuring that customers have no idea what they're paying for, or why, in any particular month.

A company spokeswoman declined to provide more detail about the rationale for the fee.

T-Mobile is by no means alone in this practice. Virtually every wireless company does it. In May, AT&T told cellphone customers that it was nearly doubling its "Regulatory Cost Recovery Charge" to 83 cents a month from 43 cents.

A company spokesman told me the increase was based on "an extremely thorough analysis" of AT&T's regulatory costs, although he declined to comment on whether those costs had similarly doubled.