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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...
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!
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?
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.
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.