No matter how much they merge with each other and how big they get, one thing about companies in the telephone business seems constant: They never tire of bickering with one another.
Last fall, MCI Telecommunications Corp. had a field day criticizing Ameritech Corp. for dragging its feet on the issue of local number portability–allowing a customer who changes phone companies to keep the same phone number.
MCI and others wishing to compete for local customers in Ameritech’s Chicago area market were upset because when they won new customers, the number portability problem was handled as if it were a call-forwarding matter. That is, when you dialed the customer’s number, it went to Ameritech as usual and was then forwarded to MCI, which completed the local call. This is called “temporary number portability.”
A new solution that sends the number directly to MCI without using Ameritech as an intermediary is dubbed “permanent number portability.” Even though Ameritech worked out the technology for permanent number portability last fall, it wasn’t activated because there was no mechanism in place to reimburse Ameritech for the cost of installing the new technology.
MCI and others cried foul, saying that Ameritech had already spent the money and knew it would be reimbursed eventually through some kind of charge to phone customers, so it should activate the new service pronto.
Ameritech finally activated permanent number portability in April to meet a deadline imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, and now it is criticizing MCI over the matter.
When it installed permanent number portability, Ameritech gave other phone companies 120 days to switch over customers using temporary number portability to the new system. That deadline expired over the weekend and MCI still has more than 4,000 customer numbers that haven’t been switched over, said Ameritech’s Neil Cox.
“This is a waste of phone numbers,” said Cox, “and I find it amazing that MCI hasn’t moved on this. It is simple to do, but MCI just hasn’t done it. Despite their contention that we weren’t moving fast enough on number portability.”
Ameritech is threatening to start charging MCI retail rates for call-forwarding each number still under the old system.
MCI spokeswoman Joan Campion said, “We’re going to sit down with Ameritech in the next week or so and work out the cut-over of our customers to permanent number portability. It requires a lot of resources and cooperation, and if it isn’t done right, it can disrupt service, which we won’t allow. We object to Ameritech imposing an arbitrary deadline on this, but we will begin the switchover in Chicago very soon.”
Phone bill blues: Cramming, the practice of putting charges on your phone bill for services you didn’t order and don’t want, is becoming a superheadache for the nation’s local phone companies, according to Roy Neel, president of the United States Telephone Association, their industry group.
The problem, said Neel, is that phone companies often get billing information from so-called aggregators that gather billing from many smaller companies. Fraudulent charges are sometimes slipped in among legitimate ones.
“It’s a great scam,” said Neel, who was in Chicago last week. “If you slip in a charge for a few dollars on lots of phone bills and only one-third of the people even notice to challenge it, that can add up to lots of money.”
The industry has adopted guidelines it hopes will stop cramming and head off efforts to pass new regulations. Neel had praise for Ameritech’s plans to redesign its bills so that new charges will be highlighted on the first page, tipping customers off to possible cramming.
“Helping customers identify unauthorized charges is a good move,” he said. “But we’d also like to catch those charges early and prevent them from even getting on the bill at all.”
One move might be to let customers put a freeze on their bills so that no new services could be charged without specific written authorization.
Seeking connections: Evanston is itching to become the Chicago area’s first technopolis and has formed a task force to get the job done.
A technopolis is a city fully wired for high-speed communications, and the Evanston Technopolis Task Force has invited communications companies to supply proposals for wiring the city with a broadband network connecting homes and businesses and Northwestern University, which is already wired up.
“We have the schools, educated work force, major research university, city support and entrepreneurial climate of a next-generation city, and now we’re looking for the fiber optic spine to pull it all together,” said Ronald Kysiak of Inventure, an economic development organization promoting the technopolis idea.
