So you went out and got yourself a local-access line for your home or a slew of access lines for your business. Just how much do you pay for the local calls you place on those lines? Figuring out those costs is a little complicated.
The local rate category refers to the immediate geographical area, usually no more than a one- to two-mile radius from the telephone from which you’re placing a call. Your LEC may try to make the local calling service appear to be free, but the fees are built into the monthly line charges.
Then there’s the tricky bit about what exactly constitutes a local call. The LEC’s customer-service people can readily specify what your local calling area includes, if you ask. But they are not required to make you understand. You have to ask them to put it in writing or refer you to existing documenta- tion that defines the local calling area for your area. Also, if you live in a larger metropolitan area (such as New York, Pittsburgh, or Dallas), the direc- tories provided by your LEC have maps that indicate what areas and prefixes make up the local calling area.
Why do you need to know your local calling area, anyway? Because not know- ing can cost you big time. Today, if you’re a residential customer, most LECs provide free local calling service. The LEC calls this unlimited local calling. People tend to interpret this as unlimited free calling within their local area. But you want to know a secret? LECs earn the greatest revenue on local calls that terminate in the local toll, regional, or in-state toll calling areas.
Most callers do not know the difference between local unlimited calling areas and local toll calling areas. The term local toll is ambiguous (and should be outlawed). As a result, customers often think they’re making free, local calls when in fact they’re paying recurring minute usage charges for what amounts to intralata or intrastate calls. Because these “hidden” charges don’t turn up until their next monthly bill, they may not realize this is happening until it is too late. Because the LEC is making more money from this lack of awareness, don’t hold your breath waiting for them to clarify it for you.
For example, from my Pittsburgh downtown residence, I can call anywhere in the immediate downtown area for free, and each call in this local area can have an unlimited amount of minute usage with no extra cost to me. But whenever I make a call to my doctor’s office in Murrysville, a Pittsburgh suburb 19 miles away, I am charged $.12 per minute. Hence the puzzling term local long distance.
Do not be misled by all this unlimited, free, local call mumbo-jumbo. If your local service is free and unlimited, it is because the LEC has every hope that you will make lots of calls just outside the local area. Then they can hit you with intralata toll charges and laugh about it all the way to the bank.
If you’re a business, the problem is even more acute and costly. Businesses must pay recurring charges for calls in the local calling area. If you work in a business with multiple lines, every PSTN outbound call placed on your busi- ness telephone is charged a variable per-minute rate based on the destina- tion of the call. In the Pittsburgh region, for example, businesses often pay $.05 per minute for calls in the local calling area. If you add the total cost of each POTS line to the total minute charges for all the local calls made on each POTS line in the company within a given month, you can begin to see exactly how much you’re dishing out for what you thought was a free local area call.
Even if your company uses higher bandwidth transport lines (covered begin- ning in Chapter 4) with an in-house telephone system, some LECs consider local calls from this type of line to be running on POTS-equivalent lines. With that little semantic sleight of hand, they still charge you the local recurring usage charge on a per-line basis.
No comments:
Post a Comment