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Verizon Bases $5 Fee To Not Publish Your Phone Number On 'Systems and IT' Costs
coondoggie writes "Let's say that for whatever reason, you'd rather your telephone number not be published. If you are a Verizon customer, that privacy privilege will cost you $5 a month. And how does Verizon justify such a significant fee for such an insignificant service? 'The cost charged to offer unlisted phone numbers is chiefly systems and IT based,' a media relations spokesman for the company tells Network World. (Asking the same question of online customer service elicited a predictably unenlightening response.) Sixty dollars a year to keep an unpublished number unpublished? Does that seem plausible?"
$5 per month is no longer in the realm of "nickel& dime", it's bare-faced robbery.
No sig today...
I call bullshit on you.
To make a phone book they have to collate a list of phone subscribers from the phone company. To exclude a subscriber, they simply don't turn over that subscriber's record to whoever makes the books. Or alternatively, the phone book company doesn't print the names of people who have the privacy bit set on their record. How can it possibly be so difficult?
How can it cost $5/month to skip over somebody's name?
What legal issues are there that would justify the same cost?
Since you're so smart maybe you can tell us exactly why.
I wish they just cut the crap. Verizon has built a system where they can sell your listing for a profit. Some of that money is used to offset the cost of maintaining your line. Without that revenue stream they need to add a fee in order for you to be a profitable customer.
It reminds of the situation with desktops and Windows. Because of licensing arrangements, it is cheaper to buy a Windows prefab than to buy a machine with no os. Crazy but true.
Without certain features some products are not as profitable for vendors, so it is discouraging, but not surprising, that they would pass on the offset costs to the end-user.
I currently work for a phone company, and less than 2 years ago was part of the "number management" group.
You're full of shit.
Phone numbers are published by a 3rd party. Once a year we do a SQL dump of our existing customers and send that over. That's how the number gets published. Our billing system has a flag: nonpublish and it's y/n
The SQL statement involved is so fucking trivial it's ridiculous. There is NO reason at all to charge for this based on the difficulty of excluding you.