I watch the TV and I see reams of has-been, second-rate actors schlepping themselves for the likes of 1-800-COLLECT, and other companies of the likes where you have to dial six hundred numbers plus 1 plus the number you are calling to get some sort of discount rate.
Now my question is, is what these companies are doing actually legal?
They way I percieve it (and correct me if I’m wrong, I know you will), these ‘long-distance’ companies have there own 1-800 number or whatever that they pay for, you call this number, they patch you through to the number you want and that they are charging you for using it. To me this seems like a hijack of the telecommunications systems, tantamount to bootlegging or scalping.
It would be like if my company provided me with a bus pass for commuting and then I was to give out to my friends (and their friends and anyone who wanted to) to use and charged them a small fee for the ‘free ride’.
Please help and maybe we can finally give David Arquette the burial he so richly deserves.
Well, I do agree with burying David Arquette. Preferable up to his neck, head covered with honey, and near a fire ant anthill. :D:D
Long distance (LD) rates from a payphone, if you use the default LD carrier assigned to it, are exorbitant, around $2 for the first 3 minutes. Plus you have to feed coins in.
After the AT&T breakup, it was decreed that phone users have the right to pick which LD carrier completes their call, even if it’s different from the default assigned to a phone.
What gets me about the collect call services: they suggest you use it for every call, even local ones, to save your friends and family “a buck or two”. On one of these commercials, the caller was calling his girlfriend. In my mind, calling collect go a GF is saying, “I’m a stupid schmoe who can’t remember to carry 35 cents to call you.”
What I can’t figure out is how collect calling makes enough money for the phone companies to support the ongoing, and not ending any time soon, advertizing campaign.
I can’t remember the last time I made a collect call.
That’s sort of what my point is. It seems as if these companies have a ‘flat-rate’ 800 number, much as a business would, but are using it to forward calls from you, to ma and pa (“Thanks for saving us a whole 25 cents, son. Looks like it will be a good Christmas this year.”) and then charging a rate that is lower than standard collect call rates for the service while they only pay the phone company for the use of the 800 number.
I think the original logic here is faulty. 1-800-COLLECT & similar services compete with the “regular” phone companies. They aren’t doing anything illegal or unethical. If I make a standard collect call to Joe, why should that cost Joe way more than if Joe had called me long distance?
Maybe someone who works for a phone company can explain the economics of this better.
1-800-Collect and relatives are “the regular phone company.”
Specifically, 1-800-Collect is a product offered by MCI Worldcom. 1-800-Call-ATT is owned by ATT. There is no end around here.
Well, OK, there is. They are getting around the operator services of the local phone company. To lower costs, they try not to use an operator at all. When you receive a collect call, a computer asks you if you want to receive a call from (the caller, who has spoken his name to the computer earlier).
So by cutting out the local operator service and by using the computers, they experience lower costs. They still pay the local phone company access charges at the normal 800-number rate.
Manny beat me to the punch. He is absolutely correct, all of those 10 10 XXX numbers and the 1800 collect call numbers you see are major LD carriers (i.e. Sprint, MCI, ATT, etc).
BE VERY CAREFUL OF ALL OF THESE!!
They sometimes work out OK for you but other times you can get really screwed. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to determine if you are making a “good” call or a “bad” call. Unless I’m missing something, it all seems very random.
For example, we just had a woman call in who insisted that she used 1800-CALL-ATT for a collect call. The call was 5 minutes and $35.00. Needless to say, she was peeved. Use prepaid calling cards - you will always come out better in the end (I got written up several times for telling our customers that - but, hell, why should I recommend them calling collect or using a company calling card at $0.35 cents a minute, when you can get a prepaid for $0.10 a min?)
Regardless of who owns the numbers, I’m still all for offing David Arquette (AWB, you are evil. I like that in a person :))
[list=A][li]Those companies aren’t just patching you through on their 800 numbers. They are either a front for MCI, Sprint, or ATT (as pointed out), or they buy phone time “in bulk” from one of the big companies and sell it at a discount (this is largely how 800 numbers work, BTW; just an an individual scale).[/li]
There have only ever been, for all practical purposes, three phone companies: First ATT, then MCI, then Sprint. All the other fly-by-nights are resellers. Sprint even started out as a reseller: AFAIK, MCI is the only other phone company to start from scratch on its own equipment. This was obviously a huge big deal when it happened: until MCI erected a string of microwave toweres (MCI = Microwave Communications Inc.) from IIRC Chicago to St. Louis for the communications of truckdrivers, telephone service in this company was a total monopoly. Since then, of course, all bets are off.
[sup](The preceding was riddled with inaccuracies and factual near misses, but the gist is correct.)[/sup]
No one gets to badmouth David Arquette until they see Johns, and then of course you won’t be able to. His 1-800-CALL-ATT commercials can neve become annoying enough to shake my conviction that he’s one of the most underrated, underutilized actors of his generation.[/list]
No, M is for Microwave. Or it use to be. I work for one of
the big three. I wish we had someone goodlooking to promote
us like Sela Ward:D, or Alyssa Milano:D, instead of
David the Dip:o
(AWB, you are evil. I like that in a person :))