Suit Says AT&T; Charges Callers for Time Not Used : Telecom: Company says billing by minute is industry standard. MCI faces lawsuit on similar grounds.

AT&T; Corp. is being accused in a lawsuit of overcharging millions of residential long-distance customers by allegedly billing them billions of dollars for telephone time never used.

Rival long-distance carrier MCI Communications Corp. also has been sued on similar grounds, and a similar action is being considered against Sprint.

AT&T; does not tell residential customers they are billed by the minute and that the time spent on the phone is rounded up to the next minute, the suit in state court alleges. A call that lasts one minute and one second, for example, is billed as a two-minute call, unlike business calls, it says.

John Skalko, spokesman for AT&T;’s residential long-distance service, on Friday denied any attempt to deceive customers, calling the residential billing practice an “industry standard.”

The plaintiffs are Lawrence Marcus of the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd and Marc Kasky of San Francisco. But the suit asks for class-action status on behalf of millions of residential AT&T; customers nationwide.

The suit, filed Thursday in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court and made public Friday, seeks to recover damages of up to $50,000 per class member.

The suit complains that AT&T; bills businesses in six-second intervals for long-distance calls, so that a call that lasts one minute and one second is billed as a one-minute-and-six-second call.

Michael Spencer, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said some smaller long-distance carriers offer residential users the same billing system--every six seconds--that AT&T; offers businesses.

A class-action suit was filed in Washington against MCI on Wednesday for similar long-distance billing practices, Spencer said. Mark Pettit, an MCI spokesman, said he was unaware of the suit and could not comment immediately.

A similar suit against Sprint is being contemplated in Kansas City, Spencer said. Sprint spokeswoman Robin Pence said the company is “not aware of the lawsuit, however any suggestion that we are fraudulently billing our customers is flat wrong.”

AT&T;’s Skalko said it is true that some businesses are billed differently than residential customers. “There is an offering for business customers who engage in the transmission of small bursts of data where this is a benefit to them,” he said.

“The average business call is 2.5 minutes; the average consumer call is about eight minutes,” Skalko said. “Because of this pattern, sub-minute billing doesn’t make sense for most consumers.”

The lawsuit said that’s beside the point: “Had plaintiffs and other members of the class known of the suppressed and concealed facts . . . they would not have chosen AT&T; as their long-distance carrier.”

Consumer Action, a San Francisco-based consumer advocacy group, has not gotten involved in this sort of billing issue, said Executive Director Ken McEldowney.

“Certainly, billing in six-second intervals would be more accurate,” he said, but the telephone companies would still get roughly the same amount of revenue by simply dividing current per-minute charges.

“I haven’t seen evidence that it would affect consumers’ billing that much,” McEldowney said.