Go to Jeff Salisbury LWGate Home Page.From: jleipol <jleipol@ibm.net>
Subject: Re: calling card payphone surcharges
Date: Mon, 11 May 1998 10:40:14 -0400
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eric <eric_marcus@compuserve.com> asked: > I have just been told that the FCC allows an extra 30 cent charge applied > to 800 # calls made from certain privately owned public phone booths. > Right or wrong (again!)? Eric: You struck a raw nerve, and will probably now get more information than you really wanted, but in my mind, "personal finance" includes anything that can add to or detract from our personal financial bottom line. So here goes: As of October 7, 1997, the FCC adopted rules that required long distance providers to compensate payphone service providers (PSPs) 28.4 cents for each call placed from payphones. Your long distance provider then passes that charge along to you, +/- a few cents (mine charges $0.35!). The intended purpose is to allow greater profits to PSPs and thus allow for greater numbers of companies to be involved as PSPs, thus giving the general public better access to payphones because there will theoretically be more of them. For more information, you can call the FCC (from any payphone, if you want) at (888)225-5322. They have a three page blurb they can fax you. They will not accept complaints by phone, but they will give you an address for mailing informal complaints. My .02 worth? The FCC rule stinks. On one hand, you get hit for $.?? every time you dial a toll-free number from a pay phone using your calling card. On the other hand, the business where I work has a toll-free number for customers to call in on, sometimes to place orders, sometimes just to get information. We have no way to tell if that call is coming in from a pay phone or not. Last month, we were charged $43.05 for some 123 calls that came in from pay phones on our toll-free number. We have no way to recover that money except to raise prices to all cutomers across the board. Granted, it's not a huge sum, but over a ten-year period it equals $5,166 of needless expense that could have been spent on something better. Ditto for any other business using toll-free lines to make it easier for customers to access them. Someone must ultimately pay the expenses, and it will be the customers, not the shareholders. Another tax (er, I mean, revenue enhancement) that you may be unknowingly paying is the FCC-mandated "Universal Service Fund Assessment", in effect since January 1998 (info also available by fax, 5 pages, "news report no. CC 97-24"). Anyone who has more than one phone line (personal or business) must be filthy rich and therefore must pay a little extra on their monthly phone bill. If you examine your phone bills (local and long-distance) you may or may not find it, depending on how it may be buried (or encoded, as they say). Where I work, it is a % of long-distance billing. If this month is average, over ten years this little jewel of legislation by the FCC will cost us $14,079.60 (and we are not a very big company). The next time you see photo-op pictures of AlGore wiring some "disadvantaged" or rural school for the internet so that the local middle-schoolers can download nude pictures, I hope you get a nice warm feeling, cause I helped pay for that, bless their little hearts. Thank you, federal government. John Leipold - -
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