You know all of those "taxes" and "fees" on your monthly cell phone bill? AT&T doesn't know what you're talking about.

A new Slashdot report highlights how a reader called AT&T and walked into several AT&T stores to ask how much will an AT&T phone plan cost per month with taxes and fees. No one could answer him—despite the fact that they do this all day, every day, for every single customer who buys a new phone.

"They are evasive and become testy when I push them on it," the reader said. "Their answer is they can't tell me what the government is going to charge me as the fees can vary month to month, but I've been an AT&T customer for several years, and my taxes and fees have not varied more than a dollar in all of that time."

He proceeded to list several different ways in which he tried to approach the question—all to no avail. So is it a conspiracy? Why is it legal for AT&T to be able to do this? Let us know what you think in the Comments section below.

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An association of rural wireless carriers are petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to re-impose a spectrum cap, RCR Wireless News reports, in light of AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless's growing market presence in the cell phone industry.

"In the absence of a spectrum cap, Verizon and AT&T will continue to grow unchecked, and rural and regional wireless carriers will be adversely affected as they attempt to obtain spectrum and compete against consolidated nationwide wireless carriers who possess greater resources and economies of scale," said Michael Higgins Jr., president of the Rural Telecommunications Group, in the report. In other words, the big guys will eat the little guys.

What's happening is that the big carriers are finding news ways of skirting obstacles in order to gain control of additional spectrum. Verizon's entire $28 billion purchase of Alltel last month, for example, was really about spectrum. Most of Alltels unique services will likely disappear, in the grand Verizon acquisition tradition.

MediaPost is reporting that global cell phone subscriptions grew by 667.6 million in 2007, according to data from technology research firm In-Stat. However, clouds are apparently on the horizon.

"An increase of only 382.5 million subscribers is expected this year due to a slowing world economy and some areas approaching saturation," the report said. "By 2012, growth is forecast to slow to 163 million cell phone customers annually, roughly twice the population increase projected for that year."

China and India remain the two largest and fastest growing markets, especially since there, a subscriber's first cell phone is often his or her first phone of any kind.

Japanese mobile content providers have joined together to create a set of safety guidelines in order to protect minors, according to MocoNews—following a June killing spree that left seven dead by a young man who used his handset to blog about his plans.

Mobile web sites, popular in Japan, "must agree to 22 rules—including monitoring postings and reporting any suspicious messages to the police—in order to get a label showing they are suitable for minors." The report said that mobile content companies have been heavily criticized following Tomohiro Kato's attacks, as a growing number of people have used mobile websites to arrange mass suicides, or to blog about their crime plans. "Kato, for instance, posted hundreds of messages, and finally acted when it turned out he had been ignored online."

Skype has named Scott Durchslag COO, according to MediaPost, who will bring 20 years of experience to the position—including stints with The Chasm Group, Grand Central and McKinsey & Company.

Most recently, and more significantly, Durchslag served as Motorola's corporate vice president of Global Product & Experience Invention. The report said that Durchslag spent five years with the consumer electronics giant, taking on roles such as general manager of South Asia and Chief Strategy Officer of the personal communications sector.

As has been widely reported, Motorola is shedding high-level executives left, right, and sideways, so it's interesting to see one of them take a position at a VoIP company (and one that's wholly owned by eBay).

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Bush administration in federal court, RCR Wireless News reports, in order to obtain records on allegedly unchecked cellphone tracking by the government.

"This is a critical opportunity to shed much-needed light on possibly unconstitutional government surveillance techniques," said Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the ACLU and lead attorney on the case, in the article. "Signing up for cellphone services should not be synonymous with signing up to be spied on and tracked by the government."

This all began after media reports surfaced about government officials using citizens' cellphones to zero in on their locations and monitor their movements—sometimes without a warrant or any court oversight, the report said.

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It's no secret that cell phone carriers aren't particularly popular with their customers. Now Forbes is in on the action with a piece that highlights how the wireless phone industry is ranked as one of the worst in the U.S. for customer satisfaction:

"Technical support calls can take hours with endless transfers from one customer rep to another. Then there's the endless pile of service activation and cancellation fees."

One Verizon customer even faked his own death last year, complete with a death certificate and a friend's help, in an attempt to get out of his contract early. (The carrier found out and charged him anyway.)

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According to a recent report from Informa Telecoms & Media, there are now more than 100 million 3G WCDMA subscribers in Europe. The analyst firm found that, at the end of May, 101.5 million of the 910.8 million mobile subscriptions in Europe were for WCDMA devices.

Italy was the first European country to launch WCDMA technology, back when 3 Italia offered the first devices in 2003. Fast-forward five years, and Italy accounts for a quarter of the WCDMA subscriptions in Europe, says a Telecoms.com article on the report from its parent company.

In an amusing but sharply-written tribute to the copper wire landline, which has seen some serious decline in usage recently, the New York Times has a piece on someone who is very attached to the reliable, clear sound of an analog phone.

As the article states, for decades, traditional phone service has aimed to provide "five nines reliability:" a dial tone available 99.999 percent of the time. That works out to 5 minutes and 15 seconds or less of downtime a year. Anyone with a cell phone or VoIP service knows that you're lucky if you don't drop more than one or two calls per day.

Henning Schulzrinne, a computer science professor at Columbia University, said in the report that he sees similarities in cellphones and VoIP services, which consumers deem reliable only as elements of a set of redundant services. "Instead of having a single device that is very reliable," he said, "people have multiple devices that are less reliable."

And with prices for VoIP, and for cell phones, still far below what moderate to heavy landline usage could ring up on a monthly basis, it's likely that consumers will continue to gravitate toward more economical (and portable) choices, versus staying grounded to their beloved landlines.

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Starbucks, AT&T, and T-Mobile have reached a deal to resolve T-Mobile's claim that the coffee chain secretly colluded with AT&T to offer free Wi-Fi Internet access in its cafes despite an exclusive agreement with T-Mobile, Reuters is reporting.

"T-Mobile, AT&T and Starbucks have entered into a memorandum of understanding to resolve their disputes and are committed to providing a high quality Wi-Fi experience for customers," Starbucks spokesperson Stacey Krum said in the statement e-mailed to reporters. She didn't disclose the terms of the deal; an AT&T spokesperson confirmed it, while T-Mobile had no comment.