Slashdot Mirror
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!
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
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
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.
Have you ever tried dropping the touch-tone service? Your modem can dial pulse and most phones can too. You'd still be able to use touch-tones on phone menus. The touch-tone service only refers to initiating the call.
Of course they'll probably tell you that it's not an option. Still, it's worth a shot.
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.
Karma: NaN
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
here's a tip i learned long ago.
when ordering a new land line, always reject the touch tone option they charge extra for. for a few weeks, only pulse dialing works. every now and then, dial using touch tones. usually, they start to work after a few weeks.
like mbourgon said, it costs the phone companies more to support pulse dialing over touch tone. they just want to see if you're dumb enough to pay for touch tone first.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
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.