Cingular and BCGI to shut down pay-as-you-go immediately

It's only a fraction of Cingular's 50 some odd million customers that use their GoPhone pay-as-you-go service, but they'll presumably be shutting those people down right quick after a federal judge found the nation's largest carrier guilty of willfully infringing patents owned by Freedom Wireless for pay-as-you-go phone sales and management. Barring an appeal successfully staying the injunction, the carrier will have 90 days to wind things down. Oh, and to make sure they get cracking, they'll have to pay Freedom a penalty of 2.5 cents for every minute someone makes a call using Cingular's GoPhone service — something which will probably cost Cingular an arm and a leg, you can imagine how quickly per-minute rates will add up for even just a single end-user. Now let's see how far Cing gets in their appeals, eh?

[Via PhoneScoop]

UPDATE: Cingular says that this doesn't affect the "vast majority" of pre-paid subscribers and that it's limited to TDMA, not GSM users.