G'day,

Can anyone who has signed up for a post-paid Telstra iPhone 3G plan confirm whether they offered you any alternatives to the normal itemised paper billing?

My monthly Telstra bill comes in an A4 sized document folder rather than folded into a DL envelope as each month it weighs in at around 50 double sided pages. This is as a result of Telstra choosing to itemise each and every time my iPhone makes a data connection (ie at least once every 15 minutes for the entire month) with a 'xxxKb $0.00' entry.

Even worse, they total up the amount at the end of those pages ($0.00 as I'm always within my 1000Mb limit) but not the actual data use - I was told by a very helpful Telstra staffer today that I could just 'get a calculator and add up the amounts' - of which there are close to 5000.

I've asked in the past whether this can be changed, but I was informed that unless I went to a summary bill (ie no separate listing of phone calls or SMSs) I would continue to receive this itemised behemoth.

I'm hoping that the new 3G iPhone plans included a smarter billing option that itemises the telephone calls made but does not list each an every data connection.

Can anyone confirm whether this is the case? If not, I predict quite an uproar in about 27 days time when Telstra start cutting down forests in order to send the first month's worth of iPhone bills to their customers.

This was a bid issue with AT&T last year.

But they sent out bills in the hundreds of pages because some idiot thought it was a good idea to itemize every data transaction from web surfing etc.

Which is exactly what Telstra are doing now. Glad to see they don't read the news / learn from the mistakes of others.

I find it interesting that this issue appears, or is highlighted, with the introduction of the iPhone. It's as if no-one ever really used 3G before-hand (even though it has been accessible with many other handsets before the introduction of the iPhone). It really says something about the ease of use of the iPhone (or the lack thereof in competitors products) in that it has effectively enabled the potential of 3G to be finally utilised. Nonetheless, it definitely shows a lack of foresight on Telstra's behalf to not realise that sending tomes of access information may not be that good an idea - if really required, this should be provided as an online service.

Sign up to Telstra.com online billing, and call customer service to stop your paper bill each month. Accounts go to printed, itemised billing by default - regardless of what handset you're using.

^ ditto to exocet, except you can even turn of the paper bill online. no need to speak to anyone (well hopefully).