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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."
If a non-existant phone rings when you're in the woods do you get billed for it?
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
Or, something. I mean seriously, when was the last time you heard about one of these companies actually offering anything beneficial to anyone? They seem to only exist as local monopolies and to rip off the consumer and limit choice every time they get.
If you ask me, any kind of 'infrastructure' system should be run by the government, like the highway system, and companies should only be allowed access to things they can't have exclusive control over.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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!
Just this morning the wife and I were talking about canceling our VZ land-line (we both have VZW phones and a cable modem).
This is just another reinforcing reason to do so. The only calls we really get on the land-line are telemarketers anyway, yet a basic line with callerid and a minimal LD plan is $38.00/month.
The consumer/end-user in this country is really getting screwed by the government and various utility oligopolies.
-This sig intentionally left blank
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.
0 line printers - $25,000
1 phone switch - $133,000
The same phone switch on newegg - $4
Succeeding to sweep a damning audit of your shady accounting under the rug: Priceless
There are some things money can't buy. You use back-office deals with the FCC for that.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
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
(Is this joke dead yet?)
1: Monopoly broken up by government.
2: Local companies and national carriers hold secret meetings with government regulators, decide how to screw customer over.
3: ???
4: Profit!!
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
...is that the wireless companies have been fighting number portability for years (it's still not required: after being passed into law 1996, the FCC has postponed implementation every year) and yet they claim them as part of their fees: Nextel, AT&T, etc
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
Sounds vaguely like what I suspect will happen here in Minnesota with other stuff. Right now, we have a pretty large ($4 billion) deficit, and a lot of programs are getting cut. Roads are a problem here because of the huge amounts of population growth we've had in the last 20 years... Right now, our state legislature is talking about allowing private companies to add additional lanes to existing roads and then charge money to use those lanes so that they can recoup the cost of building them, plus make a "reasonable profit", after which time, the cost of using those lanes would be reduced. I heard about this on the news last night, and the first thing I thought of was the telecomms and all the extra bullshit they tack onto our bills.
You and I both know that the cost of using those lanes would NEVER go down. They'll always find a way to charge more for what they've built, simply because people become so adjusted to things (like telephones) that they become a "necessity" instead of a "luxury" and people pay them blindly for the service. Look at cable TV -- how many of the channels you get in your huge bundle do you actually watch?
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The problem, fundamentally, is the local loop monopoly.
I'm no advocate of government regulation, but in economic terms, there is only one workable solution to prevent this sort of abuse. If the FCC and state regulators would get out of the way and let communities implement this, the cost and quality of phone service would improve to accurately reflect a competitive market value.
1. The community should purchase the network: all the last mile copper and rights of way should be owned by the commons and not monopolized by any private entity.
2. Any company (including the Baby Bells) can bid to rent the use of the network for the provision of any service (dialtone, DSL, etc.) to any customer. These rents should be for a term that allows for regular adjustment as the market changes.
With this approach, the Baby Bells would be in a good position to maintain a dominant market position in the near term, but not a monopoly which they can abuse. And if other firms can enter the market and do a better job of providing value to consumers and businesses, they will take market share away from the Bells.
Peace and love, y'all
The government essentially established regulations for phone companies to use in determining thier prices. Phone companies abuse the system (to get more money), and people scream about how evil the phone companies are.
The government establishes regulations on how much money welfare recipients should get. The recipients abuse the system (we've all seen stories about this at some point, somewhere)....and people scream about "the system".
A modern day witchhunt.
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!"
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 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.
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!
$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
Cingular is owned by Bellsouth
Suncom by AT & T
Verizon was Bell Atlantic and others
Sprint owns Sprint (and the former 360)
There are lots of LARGE independent cell companies. You named one. Nextel
The others are: TMobile and PowerTel with 3.8 million and 1.4 million respectively plus TMoblie has the sexy Catherine Zeta to whore for them. Man, I wish she'd "rouge her knees" for me ;)
There are others I can't think of. You are partially right. But, the cell phone companies (even if they are the same companies) are in a new era growth of competition, the phobne comapnies and the branches that formed were on a dead tree to begin with.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
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.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
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.
Now, if i, in theory can have 390 phones for $27/month how much is it really worth having one?
FRA: STFU GTFO