response 25 of 69:

Jan 5 21:04 UTC 1998

Well, I called the Michigan Public Service Commission to ask for a copy of the
tariff covering ISDN centrex lines.  I spoke with a gentleman named Howard
who politely cut off my question to say that MPSC only regulates basic phone
service, and that includes neither ISDN nor centrex.  Phone companies may
charge whatever they like for those services, as long as they are consistent
within a particular "rate group", which I gather means "geographic area".  I
told him that scg's company in metro Detroit seems to be getting different
rates than us in Ann Arbor, and he said that we may very well be in different
rate groups.  :(

So I called Shirley back to see if I could get anything out of her.  She said
that she had checked our rates and they were correct.  She also said that our
lines would have been cheaper if we hadn't put them on our centrex system, but
she told me to call someone else to find out just how cheap (and I haven't
done that yet).  She thought $300/line for installation was about right too.

We could switch our ISDN lines so they're not on our centrex, but we'll pay
an installation charge if we do.  She thought it might be about $100 per line,
but she was pretty vague on that point.

Sigh.

response 27 of 69:

Jan 6 19:11 UTC 1998

It may no longer be necessary to have ISDN lines in a Centrex system to 
avoid the per-minute charge for Business, Data calls.  My department was 
told that Ameritech had abolished the per-minute charge -- sometime in 
fall '97?  I am now making data ISDN calls for my networking installations
at work -- non-centrex sites -- and no one has screamed yet about 
per-minute charges.
 
One would have to do cost analysis to see if was worth pulling 
the ISDN lines out of the Centrex, and Ameritech seems to be intent
on making it impossible to do such analysis.  Perhaps future quotes
from our telco should be in hard copy.
 
It would be news to me if there were no tariff covering ISDN.
It's possible that as part of telco deregulation Ameritech no longer 
need to file such a thing.
 
What's really awful here is that Grex is smarter than most Ameritech 
customers.

response 29 of 69:

Jan 6 23:39 UTC 1998

I suspect it's a result of a disorganized company having a lot of new business
thrust upon it all at once, because of the explosion of telecommunications
options in the past few years.  I suspect their computer systems and
management structure aren't up to the task, and on top of that a lot of their
employees seem not to be very bright.

response 31 of 69:

Jan 10 22:08 UTC 1998

   The guy at the MPSC wasn't able to get the stuff together in
time to send it to me.  We're trying for Monday sometime.

response 35 of 69:

Jan 14 07:17 UTC 1998

This is mostly unrelated to this item, but this is as good a place as any to
post it:

We got mail from MCI today saying that in March they are going to start
charging us a $5 minimum fee, even if we make no long distance calls at all.
Since we never make any LD calls, this would affect us and be an annoying
waste of money.

We were never sure how MCI got to be our long distance carrier in the first 
place, since a while back we asked that we have *no* long distance carrier
specified on our lines.  I called Shirley and she told me that while all of
our regular phone lines have no LD carrier selected, our ISDN lines do, so
that's the source of the problem.  I asked her to change the ISDN LD carrier
to "NONE", and she said she would, but that Ameritech charges a fee of (I
think it was) 95 cents per line for having no long distance carrier on you
ISDN line.  Sigh.  So we'll be paying (I think) $3.80 in charges unless we
can find an LD carrier which has no minimum fee.

What a pain.  Anyone know which LD carrier we should switch to?

response 37 of 69:

Jan 14 19:18 UTC 1998

then we should be justified in filing a complaint with the mpsc about mci
hooking us up without authorization, correct?

response 39 of 69:

Jan 14 20:57 UTC 1998

Yes, ATT now charges a minimum of $5/mo for businesses (like mine).
I changed my provider to Working Assets Long Distance, which doesn't
charge a minimum.  *But* the best thing is to get Ameritech to take
all long-distance service off our ISDN line.  Even *Ameritech* should
realize this is a special-purpose line, since they sold it to us
with that understanding.   8-)

response 41 of 69:

Jan 15 03:30 UTC 1998

For the same reason that they charge extra, monthly, for tone dialing, even
though having to maintain pulse capability costs them.

response 43 of 69:

Jan 15 14:21 UTC 1998

Well, what do *you* think?

response 45 of 69:

Jan 15 23:21 UTC 1998

More bad news, I'm afraid:  I just got the phone bill, and our monthly service
charge is going up $.30 per line per month (on our regular dial-in lines).
That means an extra $4.50 per month.  I thought they couldn't do that to us
because we had a centrex contract, but apparently they think otherwise.  I'll
call Shirley tomorrow.

response 47 of 69:

Jan 16 05:21 UTC 1998

Yeah, I think that's a tax change, not an Ameritech change.  The taxes
probably aren't written into the contract.

The large difference in ISDN costs is certainly worth pursuing.  I wonder if
chasing after a few dollars a month with the long distance thing is really
worth the time it will take up.