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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."
It's times like this that I'm glad I don't pay the local phone monopoly ~$40/month for the "priviledge" of having a landline.
Ever since I've used my cellphone as my main phone, my phone bill stays consistent month to month, I don't pay extra for long distance (or get screwed in intra-state charges), I get no telemarketing calls, and I have one number where I can be reached.
Cut your landline if you can!
I know in Tennessee, there was/is a 1 or 2 dollar charge per month for having a touch tone instead of a rotary tone.
My father-in-law resisted for years but finally gave in.
I got rid of my long distance carrier completey and saved all those FCC imposed taxes on my phone connection. I usually just email anyone who lives outside of my local calling area. If I ever do need to make a LD call, I just use my cell phone or a cheap calling card.
Well now you've done it. By stating your Socialist ideals you'll have every Libertarian, Republican, Democrate and Idiot crawling out of the woodwork to call you a pinko commie, and this entire article is going to collapse into a flamewar about religion, politics and the War in Iraq. Just like every other article this past six months, come to think of it.
While I may be inclined to agree with you to a certain extent, if you want to see the effects of having everything nationalised then take a look at the U.K in the 70's. We're still dealing with the effects from a lot of Labour policies in the 60's and 70's. It isn't always a good idea.
Also, the Bell system invented DSL back in the last 70's but didn't pursue it because of their own short-sightedness. Then it comes to pass that when the Internet boom took off and the Bell companies were left out in the cold, suddenly they wanted to 'charge' fees each time someone dialed-up an ISP phone number. Luckily the count system told the Bells to suck it. The Bell system claimed it was putting more burden on their system, which might very well be the case, however, they also stuck it to the consumer for YEARS with this 'unlimited local calls' for one rate when they had done studies way back in the day to determine that the average customer makes/receives 6 calls a day with the average call being 4.2 minutes. Now that customers are using MORE of their unlimited service the phone company is crying the blues...
Let them reap what they've sewn all these years
Having a land line is a grotesque and arrogantly undisguised rip-off. If it wasn't for my modem I'd lose it and get a cell. I mean, I still get billed an itemized $5/month for "touch-tone service". The phone company must have recouped the cost of converting to touch-tone many years ago. Almost nobody uses an old-fashioned pulse dial phone anymore.
And yet.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I moved 6 months ago from one house to another and informed Verizon to change my number and consequently terminate my old number, since then my old number has a bill being sent to my new house that keeps adding on and is now up to $350. I called Verizon about it and told them there is no line for that number anymore and never existed in my new residence in the first place, the nasty jerk on the other side said that maybe I requested a second line to add on and if what I was saying is true then there couldnt be a bill because in order to get a bill you have to be using your line (total BS by the way), I told this guy to check when the last time I made a call on that number was, sure enough he told me it was 6 months ago and the last call was to Verizon TS, I asked if there were any notices filed for termination on the date of that call.... About 5 minutes of pause later he told me a supervisor would be in contact shortly.... that was 3 days ago!
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
My wife and myself both have cell phones, and a land line. I contemplated exactly what you're suggesting, but I need my land line for my DSL. Cell reception is also spotty out where I live; my cell calls from my home often get dropped. they get me coming and going.
It's a scam, but they've got me... no other broadband available in my area. Of course, even if cable was available, they STILL force you to get a basic cable package before you can get cable broadband. I'm not a TV watcher, so that's money down a rathole.
What company do you use? Nationwide long distance or anything? I'm curious how you're making this work.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Four years back, I purchased my home. Location mattered, since I wanted DSL and a static IP address.... (all the normal stuff - school system, neighborhoods, etc - were covered too) Called the phone company, was half the maximum distance from the CO, and had the go install DSL after we finished closing. A couple weeks went by and nothing. Finally, I called to find out when they were going to show up and they tell me the lines in our area were multiplexed (?) and would not support DSL. They don't work better than 4kb/s with a POTs connection either, compared to the 48-50kb/s I was getting in my apartment dial up.
Road Runner moved in a year later and gave me a glorious broadband connection at home, and my servers are at a local ISP. The day my Hughes DirectTV DVR pulls info over my network rather than POTs, is the day I cancel my land line and run all calls through our mobiles. I suspect it is game over for both the cable and telcos once the wireless broadband hits it strides.
Every time the phone company would call me during supper trying to sell me the latest service, I would ask them for one thing. Can you give me a DSL connection? I'll be damned, but that just horked up the call center script badly. (grin)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Everyone here seems to be talking on the same general thread "cancel your land line to screw the bells".
Who exactly do you think you're hurting?
Verizon = Northwest Bell
SBC = Southwest Bell
Cingular = PacBell (owned by SBC, see above)
Who's left?
AT&T? They started this fiasco.
WorldCom? Better known as MCI, now bankrupt
Sprint? NexTel?
Nobody's going to get screwed by you cancelling yoru land line. You're still paying the same people for your cell phone. Do you think their accounting practices will suddenly become honest just because you're now using wireless?
"There's too much rat hair in McDonald's food, so I'll just have their fries".
Think people! Think!
When I was younger, J.R. Ewing was supposed to be the typical example of "evil capitalist".
Now, he indeed seems to have been obsoleted.
But don't take it wrong : in Europe, we had loads of similar examples : Paris'Mayor's wife who got 10000's of dollars for a few dozen pages bugous report, France former Prime Minister, Edith Cresson, who was proven guilty of sharing European money with her dentist, etc.
So, well, it is not typically American, this is just typically global.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
$5 billion every year from the consumer
/. what am I thinking.
Now lets gets some of the facts straight. What they found was 5 billion in equipment that the bells had on their books but couldn't be found. They aren't getting away with that whole amount each year. I'm outraged by the whole bells situation too, but let's read the article. Especially one as informative as this one. I know, this is
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
I did this 3 years ago and I couldn't be happier. 7 addresses and 2 states later, I still have the exact same number, no long distance charges ever, and although I'm probably paying too much I know exactly what I'm going to be billed every month. With my Verizon landline, I had message rate service for $11/month, yet my phone bill was regularly $30+ including the long distance carrier before I made a single call.
I'd just like to add that I have AT&T for my wireless service and they suck. I routinely get bills that say "due upon receipt", but are overdue by the time I get them, somehow all my bills from them always show up with no postmark, and I've had my service disconnected several times for failure to pay a bill that wasn't due yet because of "glitches" in their system. You really can't win, but it's less complicated than the hassles of a landline.
I switched to Vonage a few months ago and I don't pay any fees except a little over a dollar for Federal tax.
Of course, I don't expect this to last too long, but in the meantime, it's been well worth it! My old phone bill had over $35 of bullshit fees a month from the subscriber line charge, to the universal service fee. It's all a giant scam.
Check out your bill and notice the "Federal Excise Tax"...it's about 3% of your bill. Ever wonder what it's for?
It was originally supposed to pay for the Spanish American War.
It was supposed to be a temporary tax that went away after it satisfied it's original intent. Haha! Sure...
I wonder what is the oldest such tax??
This is a normal failure of regulating monopolies. If your plan for an industry is to have a private monopoly and regulate it, then expect this sort of thing to happen every few decades.
If you choose nationalisation instead, it's much worse. Costs may be low, but service will be dreadful to non-existent. Want a new phone line installed? Sure: it will be ready in 6 months to a year (eg UK or Italy before privatisation).
Local community ownership has been raised here; that might work. One region of the UK -- Kingston upon Hull -- had a phone service run by the local council (city government). I think it was more or less OK, much like the nationalised service. The council sold it off for umpteen million at the top of the telecoms boom, then lost all the money in an investment swindle (or it might have been BCCI). In the UK at least, massive incompetence or corruption is always a danger with local government.
Deregulation is tricky too. Comms networks are a textbook natural monopoly: barriers to entry are huge. You will be lucky to end up with real competition.
I think light regulation is the best answer. Try to encourage competition rather than capping retail prices. The inefficiencies caused by having duplicated facilities provided by competing businesses are small compared to the institutional paralysis produced by public or private monopolies. In many countries people have abandoned monopoly-provided fixed lines in droves for competing cellular providers.
The moment you sit regulators round a table with the industry to make deals, you're heading for disaster. Politicians are tempted to do this to get "achievements" they can point to, but there's always a price and it's usually hidden from the electorate. It's better for the politicians to stand back, and only intervene when they see anti-competitive behaviour, and then stamp down without any discussion.
For the RBOCS, keep in mind that serious regulation started in 1934, and there were 23 local companies operating under the AT&T banner. Then those companies were consolidated into seven in 1984, and have further combined into just three. Could anyone have kept accurate track of equipment and accounting for it under those conditions?
I work at a company whose head office is located in an old manor house within a high-scale community. Sometime during the development of the community, before the company acquired the house and while the community's developer was using it as its sales office, the local phone company decided that the manor house's basement would be a good place to house an OC-3 multiplexer (a Fujitsu FLM-150, in this case) to serve the community, despite the fact that the building would eventually become a private property.
A few years later, the developer finished its work, and sold the house to our company, who then sent contractors to upgrade the electrical and network wiring. At one point, they found two pairs of wires that were unmarked, and they couldn't figure out what they were used for (not out of incompetence, mind you), so they yanked them. Come the next day, a telco van was outside, saying that they had received complaints about loss of service and may I please come in to check our equipment.
It didn't take long for the facilities manager to ask the telco to please get the bloody machine out of our property. The requests have fallen on deaf ears, however. We still have the multiplexer here, along with the telco end every pair of analogue and digital lines in the community, including the T1 smartjacks for the country club next door. It is absolutely trivial to come in and open the multiplexer's cabinet and screw around with the linecards inside it, not to mention being able to tap into any of the lines on the demarc's punch panels themselves. The telco knows all of this, but they won't do anything about it because they're too bleeding lazy and it would cost them money to move the equipment to somewhere else.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
You can read about many of the other scams the teleco's are in at TeleTruth. Some quotes from their front page:
"Teletruth estimates that customers paid Verizon Pennsylvania $785 per household for a fiber-optic service they will never receive."
"50% of All Small Business phonebills have mistakes. ---And that's why we have announced our "Send Us Your Phone Bill" campaign in the Verizon territory to help business and residential customers recover overcharges on their Verizon telephone bills."
Also if you have a lot more time than I do you can read "The Unauthorized Bio of the Baby Bells" and How The Bells Stole America's Digital Future. Excerpt from the latter:
"New Networks Institute (NNI) estimates that consumers have already paid over $45 billion in extra telephone charges, and continue to pay over $8 billion annually. As monopoly providers of local phone service, the Bells are still subject to some regulation, yet they are among the most profitable companies in America today. Bell profit margins are more than double that of the major competitive long distance companies and other regulated utilities and literally 167% above the profit margins of some of America's best-known companies. Much of this excess profit is a result of the financial incentives that were supposed to build the infrastructure for America's digital future."
The guy behind all this is Bruce Kushnick. I've yet to find any one claiming he's anything but on the level. If you have please email me.
My blog post about this
You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me.
Its like a giant non-profit company owned by the federal government.
That's the way to go! When they nationalize things like the phone industry, or even (eventually) the ISP industry, then they shouldn't make it into another agency (then we'll just have more bureacracy), but basically non-profits owned by the gov't. We pay them money (as opposed to it coming out of taxes), and they provide us with a service. Their goal isn't necessarily to make money, but to provide the best service for the least money, and better society.
And what's wrong with that?
--Jason
http://www.virtualvillagesquare.com/ Online Communities: The Next Generation
your going to have a hard time believing this... But a few years ago I changed LD carriers from MCI to AT&T (yea I know going from one bad egg to another, but AT&T had a intl dialing plac for 5c to Ireland/UK so I jumped ship)....
In the regulatory crap you have to go through, you know your call is being recorded etc... I was handed from MCI to AT&T, but in the process somehow unknown to be, MCI transfered my LD to AT&T, but kept my "in state" calls... You fell asleep so far... My local is with AT&T (cable), instate now is MCI and LD is AT&T.
BUT... MCI decided that ther must have been a problem, so they went and grabbed my LD back from AT&T, but somehow, I ended up with TWO LD carriers, gawd knew which one was actually carrieing my calls, I got two bills with the exact same LD info...
Cutting this short, it took me over a dozen calls, and a conference call between MCI, AT&T LD AND AT&T local to sort the mess out, with each manager (I know better to talk to the bottom feeders, I go right for the managers with the power complexes!) blaming each other, until I just got each company to take what was rightfully theirs... So much so, I actually got a hold of AT&T to "replay" my voice authorisation changing my "instate" and LD to AT&T from MCI, once that as played, everyone shut up, and within 24 hours I was able to verify that my local and instate and LD were all being handled by AT&T... Phew!
All this was over my wife getting a call from MCI billing one afternoon regarding a deliquent in-state bill for just over six dollars (due to mail being stuck together somehow!). She called me, I called MCI, the manager I spoke to was nasty, demanding the $6 bill or he would send my account to debt collection agency, so that is when the "trouble" started with changing all my services to AT&T.
In work, I read the bills we get from VZ having changed our LD carrier a few times overn the past year or so, and the bill is virtually unreadable, and having now seen our first QWest bill, is there any info on the net on hoe to "decode" this CRAP?
My experience with AT&T long distance billing was similarly terrible. I work for a company that used to be an AT&T service provider. We have a small switch that we maintain and I was assigned to match the records with the switch with the Call Detail Records that AT&T was sending us for our bill. It was pretty much impossible. A fair percentage of calls had wildly differing call lengths. Most switches were within 60 seconds of ours, but some varried by hours or days. A number of calls in their records simply do not exist in ours in any way.
One month I was asked to investigate a huge jump in our bill (30 or 50 percent as I recall). After spending hours fiddling with my record-matching perl and coming back with nothing, I looked at the datestamps on the records. There were records spanning 14 previous months. Once those were stripped out our bill was as close to right as we could hope to demonstrate.
Has anyone ever seen something that will let you make calls with your regular telephone, but route them out through your cellphone? Something like a base station that you plug into your homes phone wiring, and then drop your cellphone into when you want to use one of the homes wired phones? They make them for VoIP phones, but I havn't seen one that works with cells.
Anyway, if I could find one out there, that is what I would use.
Casca
Anyone else out there live in an apartment or condo complex that adds "Association Connection Charges?"
:)
Supposedly for the cost to tie into the network, oddly enough I don't get one of these when I live in a home which would cost more to wire as it's an independent unit, and funny how it doesn't cost me money every month of every year to get a new phone line added.
Associations pull this scam constantly, they do the same with the Cable, I got about $5/mo going to these association fees, but we'd never actually add them to our community association fees (which are already the highest in the city).
My same scam of a community is trying to charge me money for parking my cars, I'm working with my neighbors to get a group together to get a lawyer and oust our association as our condo group is a land contract which means I own the land my house sits on and an equal share of all common grounds, which means with a full vote any management can and will be dissolved
Associations are insane scams, our group pays a management company $35,000/yr to collect the fees / hire maintenance people, thats just dumb.
There are specific laws prohibiting any private company from becoming a letter carrier. The parcel delivery business is different. If you set up a bicycle courier service in a big city, and your bicycle-riding delivery people put letters into the official US Postal Service mail boxes that people and businesses have put out on the street/sidewalk, your couriers will be arrested. It's specifically against the law for anybody except for an official USPS letter carrier to put letters in a mailbox.
Certainly not the UK's postal serivice. I live just outside of NYC, and my sister lives in East London. I like to send her care packages filled with boxed macaroni and cheese from Shop-Rite, twinkies, and hostess cupcakes. These things are worth their weight in gold to my sister's coworkers, so it's worth shipping. In any case, the first time I shipped a box like that, it took THREE months to get from Elizabeth (home of Elizabeth Seaport and Newark International Airport -- not hard to find a way to london) to London. Once it got there, it was about half the size as when I sent it. Second time I sent something, it only took a month to get there, BUT the postal service over there dropped a letter in her mailbox stating that she had to pick up her package between the hours of 11 and 2 at some post office nowhere near her house. When she finally got out of her job teaching kindergarten to pick up her package, they had lost it in the post office and told her to come back in a few weeks. When she complained, they told her that she had no right to complain and to please leave the post office before the police were called. Eventually, when she inquired about the package again, they said that there was "NO SUCH ADDRESS". Apparently, the postal service is both all-knowing and blind at the same time. How could there be "NO SUCH ADDRESS" if they gave her a note saying she could pick up her package? I called up royal mail or whatever excuse for a postal service they had, and after 5 minutes of abuse by some customer service rep, I told him to fuck off, and I sent my package via Fedex or UPS, I can't quite remember which. It got there in two weeks, with no problem.
While I may be inclined to agree with you to a certain extent, if you want to see the effects of having everything nationalised then take a look at the U.K in the 70's. We're still dealing with the effects from a lot of Labour policies in the 60's and 70's. It isn't always a good idea.
As it turns out, as far as I can tell, apparently no federal policy maker (economic or otherwise) has read Milton Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom (making this event quite ironic). Hell, I haven't even read more than half of it yet, and I can probably tell you how fucked up the current state of regulation is. Things which are currently regulated should no longer be, (e.g., post office, etc.). Things which are currently unregulated should be (e.g., MS, cable, etc.). Doesn't anyone read anymore? Or do politicians never escape adolescence when they think they know more than everyone else?
moto411.com
For $40/mo, I get an IP phone that I can take and plug into any broadband network via DHCP. I get unlimited calls anywhere in the US and Canada, and no other fees.
The voice quality is good, and the price is excellent, and I can take the # anywhere I want to - just plug into broadband, it autoconfigures with DHCP, and in 10 seconds or less, I'm up!
The bells, with all their "X per minute on Wednesdays between 4 and 11PM" bull---t are ripe for a serious change in their business model.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.