Phone Companies Bill Public for Nonexistent Equipment

Srinivasan Ramakrishnan writes "Forbes has an eye-opening article on the scam that lets the Bells scoop $5 billion every year from the consumer with the sanction of the FCC. The FCC Line charge that appears on every phone bill is a vestige of a deal that was struck by the FCC with the Bells. The deal was touted by the FCC as a historic win that saved $3.2 Billion a year for the consumer - Forbes takes a closer look at the deal."

Comments

UK line charges

[Radian]

In the UK we get charged for line rental (approx £10/month), and we pay for all calls - including local calls. It is my understanding that in the US local calls are free, so you are getting something for the rental charge.

Phone company billing just sucks, period

[swb]

Phone company billing is just awful no matter how you slice it. I manage the phone system here, and unless you're an (ex-) Qwest employee there's no way you can understand the detailed billing associated with your phone service. The actual monthly phone bill I get from Qwest (or bills, some things they insist on billing seperately -- a RAS PRI has its primary trunk number billed on a seperate bill) looks like my home phone bill, with two extra digits. No service detail, nothing.

When I took over the phone guy's responsibility when he quit, I asked the telco for a detailed customer record, and I got ~175 page report that detailed our services in a totally unintelligible report. Each DS0 from our four D1s took up about a page on the report, detailing every 10 cent tarrif that made up the price of each DS0, along with the other tarrifs associated with the DS1 itself. After looking at it I pretty much gave up and handed it over to our phone maintenance vendor who audited for me -- they employee two ex Qwest employees specifically for this purpose, since the codings and info aren't explained anywhere but in some Qwest internal documents.

We ended up dropping a bunch of 1FB (telco slang for analog copper) circuits, CENTREX circuits and other stuff we weren't using. They were live on our demarc block, but not punched to anything.

This isn't unusual, either -- the vague monthly invoicing and byzantine customer records lead to so many overbilled or unused service that there's an entire industry that does nothing but audit phone bills in exchange for a percentage of the savings.

My experience with telcos leads me to believe that half of this is a monopolistic lack of desire for reform, government bureaucracy and overregulation, and excessive merger activity that's left them with dozens of computer systems that don't communicate without human intervention. I've been told by both Sprint and Qwest that they have systems so complex that there are few people there who can even *use* both of them, but data is required to be pulled/entered from both of them to get anything done.

Unfortunately I don't see any hope for reform. You pretty much have to do business with them, and when business is good they give you what they want and waste the money on mergers and exec perks (Nacchio sucks!), and when business is bad (like now), they plead poverty and can't afford to fix this.

I guess the only hope is that some of the CLECs can do better without becoming just like the ILECs, although I'd imagine the temptation is to become the ILECs, not improve on them.

Re:cut the line!

[Kombat]

When you get a telemarketing call on your cell, ask them their name, the company they're calling for, and their return phone number. They are legally required to give you all of this information, if you ask.

Then, ask to speak to the person's manager/supervisor. Inform him/her that this is a cell phone. It is illegal for them to call cell phones. At this point, you've already got their information, so they can't just hang up and run. Inform them that you wish to recoup the cost of this call, and that you want them to send you a cheque for $100 USD. If they refuse, tell them you will take it up with the FCC, and the fine they will levy will be much, much more than that.

Hey, it's worth a shot.

Re:another good example...

[tomzyk]

I just noticed this last night while looking at my SprintPCS cellphone bill. I noticed that over the past few months my bill has been steadily increasing. (It's only a few cents every month, but it still keeps climbing!) My last bill was $0.41 higher than the previous one!

Now, they put the extra charge in the "Taxes and Federal Fines" (or whatever) section, and yet when I checked up on the explanation of these fees, it says something along the lines of "Eventhough we SAY that these are taxes, they really aren't. We're just making this tax/charge up because we're being forced into this number-portability thing..."

Seriously. Is this legal to label it as a "tax" eventhough it isn't? Man, I'm starting to distrust any fee-based company because they keep raising charges. (I've been with DirectTV for only about 1.5 years and they've already raised my monthly fees by at least $6 and removed some of the channels in hopes that I'll just "upgrade" my package and pay more.)

For those of you with SprintPCS, check your April bill.

The reason.

[Catskul]

The US postal system has been separated from the teet. The reason it has been able to work well is that it receives acts in a vaccuum. I believe that it receives no money from the government, and keeps the profit within the system. Its like a giant non-profit company owned by the federal government. It does have its problems though. The regulation that it does have has caused problems. Just do a search on google for: united states postal service business model

and if you are intrested in how the USPS is organized, look here.

Re:Nationalize local phone access!

[Martin Blank]

The USPS doesn't get a dime of taxpayer money. All of what they do is paid for through postage and other services. This is why they make their annual reports of profits and losses.

Now if they could just let Amtrak do the same thing and stop throwing tax dollars at *that*...