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For discussion of telephone instruments and services.
41 responses total.
Within the past week I received two flyers for different reduced-rate long-distance dialing services. These require that you just dial in a five digit code before the telephone number, and you get significant savings without changing your regular LD carrier. They are: 10297 - Long Distance Wholesale Club: You dial 10297 first, and you "save 15-50% on interstate long distance calls" Dial and Save: You dial 10457 first, and you are guaranteed "25% saings below AT&Ts long distance calling rates". [replace the word "dial" with "punch" in the above, if you wish 8^}.] This is stated to all be FCC approved, etc, and are possible by the company buying long-distance time "wholesale" from LD providers, and offering the services at less than major-provider retail rates - they claim. Does anyone have more information about these services? Do they really save 15-50%, or 25%? Are there any "catches"?
The catch is that AT&T's rate structure is so complicated that you can argue that you are charging some % less than AT&T's regular rates and still be more than the rate that AT&T charges any actual customer. I had been dealing with a no-name long distance company, Allnet, for a long time. They have been taken over by another no-name company recently, Frontier. I stick with them because the service hasn't been bad and the rates seem fairly reasonable. You can dial 10xxx to get to any long distance company with any call if you want. Many of the phone companies you get to with 10xxx add an extra page to your Ameritech bill, and others send you a separate bill.
I got the 10297 thing in the mail too, and was impressed by what broad claims they were making, while still being incredibly short on specifics. I couldn't even find a specific reference to which long distance company was charging the rates the savings were for, although I think it alluded to it being AT&T. I'm using Sprint, primarily because they're what my parents have been using for years and I didn't see any reason not to continue using them when I moved out. There probably are cheaper options, but Sprint is actually willing to say how much they're charging, and their rates seem quite reasonable. It's going to take a lot more than a mailing telling me I can save some percentage off of a rate they won't identify to get me to switch.
The question made the front page of the Detroit Free Press today! Wow, am I ahead of the news (for once). The article is cautionary, but they published a table comparing rates. Generally, Dial&Save and L.D. Wholesale were cheaper than AT&T and MCI, but not so much cheaper for Sprint, for the comparisons made (to Chicago; to S.F.; to Ann Arbor - for daytime or weekend). They also warn that "Sprint, AT&T and MCI offer substantial discounts from these rates" (though I don't know what that means). What seems uncertain is whether this will be true tomorrow, etc.
I found the Dial&Save thing today, in the bin below the mailboxes at my apartment building. It didn't have an apartment number on it, so it looks like they sent one for a building with 30 apartments in it. I wonder if they bill the same way. ;)
Does anyone have insight into portable phone quality? We are on our 4th AT&T cell phone and even when they work, they are poor. I was discussing this with a friend, and he indicated he and his inlaws had the same experience and finally decided to forego the free AT&T replacements and settle for another brand. Right now, the AT&T has a lot of distortion and it will mis-dial unless you punch in the numbers about 3 seconds apart. Each time AT&T gladly replaces, even upgrading it. We have decided that "free" is not worth it and will buy a Sony, Panasonic, or whatever. (I could not find ratings on the internet). Any suggestions?
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Though I do not own or have ever used a cell phone, I have one word for you: Motorola.
I'm looking for a new long distance company. I've been using Sprint for a long time and have generally been pretty happy with them. Their Sprint Sense program, which was 10 cents per minute in the evenings and 15 cents per minute during the day, was nice. Then a few months ago I got a notice that they were upping the daytime rate to 25 cents per minute. Now, either they've screwed up my bill, or they've raised the rates for evening calls too. This month's phone bill includes calls for a total of 45 minutes to Swarthmore, pennsylvania. This comes out to $23.19, or about 31 cents per call. All of it is night or evening, which according to the TV commercials are still supposed to be 10 cents per minute. A few of those are one minute calls (presumably when I've gotten my brother's voice mail), and those are billed at $1.66 each, considerably more than the 10 cents they are supposed to be billed. In a new long distance company I'm looking for somebody with reasonable and consistent rates. I'm also looking for a company that will be my primary long distance carrier so I don't have to dial a special access code, because I'm lazy. Some of the smaller fly by night phone companies I've dealt with at work are using NT based switching software, which causes their network to have to go down for a reboot whenever new customers are added. I don't consider that acceptable. What experiences have people had with the various long distance companies? Who has good residential rates these days?
I'm using Working Assets Long Distance. this is a really left-wing company which includes a couple of political / social issues in each bill. The rates are pretty good, and if you sign up for the right deal you can get some free ice-cream. 800-548-2567, http://www.wald.com
My most recent Sprint bill showed a single call to my parents, in the evening, and it was exactly 10c per minute (it was something like 73 minutes, if length of call has anything to do with it, which I doubt). Hopefully they just messed up your bill, scg. In general, I've been very pleased with Sprint. Used to say the same about MCI until they jerked me around on 'stay with us' discount deals.
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I haven't moved as recently as the rates went up. My calls tend to be much later in the evening than 7. I still need to find time to call them and see what's going on. Going back over old phone bills, I see that they were charging me 10 cents per minute before. I was wondering about that, since I wasn't sure if this was the sort of thing I would normally have noticed or not. This month, the Sprint bill coupled with a huge Ameritech local long distance bill (all of which was work related, so they'll reimburse it) made the total number on the phone bill look really huge compared to what it normally looks like.
For each person I personally sign up I will donate $5.00 to this bbs
cyberspace.org. This is only fair.
I'm selling one of the lowest standard (not your 6 month wonder) long distance
rates. It is 15 cents from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and 9 cents a minute from 7 p.m.
to 7 a.m.
Good stuff:
1) After the first 60 seconds it is exact billing.
2) Penny-a-minute on designated holidays for the first 30 minutes.
New year's Day
Valentine's Day
Mother's Day
Father's Day
Fourth of July
Grandparent's Day
Thanksgiving Day
Christmas Day
3) Free 1-800 or 1-888 number, which costs 25 cents per minute.
4) Free calling card at 30 cents per minute.
5) We pick up switching fees.
Fine print:
1) I work for ACN which markets for LCI.
2) $3.00 per month fee.
3) Minimum charge per call is one minute.
4) If I don't sign you up I don't get paid.
If want to sign up e-mail me at okuma@cyberspace.org.
This would probably be a bit more appropriate in the Classifieds Conference....
Dial and Save (Telco) is 10 cents/minute at all hours, if you pay them $3/month, but the local toll calling area you have to dial 10457 first. If you don't pay $3/month, it is 15 cents/minute 9 to 5 (I think those are the hours) weekdays. So if you make a lot of daytime calls, this plan might be better than Warren's (paying the $3/month, I mean) but his are definitely a bit cheaper after 7 pm. Local toll calls without the 10457 are cheaper if you don't dial any 5-digit number (at least with Dial and Save). I am not working for them, but almost never have had any problems, they are very friendly, and they even paid me $5 to sign up on a new phone (and I did not have to pay the $5, first sign-up is free). Once in several months I cannot get through and have to use AT&T if I am in a hurry, at a busy time. I pay for 1 minute increments (first minute is 10 cents, some plans charge for a 3-minute minimum).
AT&T is advertising nine cents per minute, any time, with some minimum amount. I forget what the minimum amount is. They're presumably assuming that residential customers aren't going to make daytime calls much anyway, so undercutting everybody else's daytime rates won't hurt them much. It's worth not basing long distance shopping entirely on price. Some cheap long distance companies, especially cheap 800 service companies, really cut corners. I dealt with one company a while back that was using some Windows NT system as their phone switch. Whenever they needed to add new numbers, they had to reboot and their network went down for 20 minutes. Even when their network was up, the quality was pretty bad, and getting modems to stay connected over it was hard. If you're having trouble getting through occasionally with Dial & Save, it sounds like they're either using unreliable equipment, or are keeping prices down by not having enough capacity, neither of which is very good. I'm using Sprint. They're charging me 10 cents per minute for the times of day when I tend to make inter-LATA long distance calls from home, and it works really well. At some point they were billing me the wrong rate, but they got it taken care of pretty quickly when I called them about it. Warren says the service he's selling is a reseller for LCI. They're a reputable company, so it should be reliable.
I can recall only about 3 times in two years that I could not get through with Dial and Save, and I make about 300 or more minutes of long distance calls a month, at peak times.
What are the best deals for long distance these days? I'm currently paying 9.9 cents per minute (rounded up to the nearest whole cent) with no monthly charges, and I'm wondering if there is any carrier out there that offers lower rates without any bogosity. (Note that I don't want to pay a monthly fee, because I only use about an hour or two of long distance each month.)
I'm paying about 7.5 cents per minute with Coast to Coast. No monthly fee, but they do require credit card billing. They're also only available in SE Michigan, as far as I know, but I've seen that sort of deal elsewhere. Frontier's website is currently advertising 8 cents per mintue (www.frontiercorp.com). Again, that's apparrently credit card only. Qwest is advertising some bizarre system where your rates drop the longer you've been a customer of theirs, starting at 9 cents per minute and dropping to 5 cents per minute after 25 months (also credit card billing). I think I saw something saying that 10-10-811 is now 5 cents per minute for domestic calls, but call them and ask since I may not be remembering accurately.
Qwest drops the rates half a cent every six months. $4.95/month fee unless
they do a credit card billing. They messed up my account by apparently not
signing me up the first time I called (they said they had no record of my
calling), then signed me up again after three weeks. A couple of days ago
they billed me for two accounts for the same phone number, one of them for
zero calls, with a $4.95 fee on each. One was a bill, one was charged to my
credit card. (I had requested the credit card option both times). But
someone friendly and competent, who gave me her name and extension number,
said she fixed all these problems and I would now have one account with no
fee and a credit for the $5.50 (with tax) overcharge.
It costs $1.50/month to have a long-distance provider on each line.
Not to have any long distance provider costs $1.52 (in Ann Arbor). (The $1.50
is Qwest's fee, I think, cleverly lower than $1.52). Ameritech said that
Qwest does not provide local long distance service. Qwest said they do. I
am continuing to use the access code for Dial and Save when calling Detroit
until someone can tell me for certain. Dial and Save managed to sign me up
for local long distance on two out of three lines after I asked for all three,
so I cancelled them and just use the access code now. (They also neglected
to tell me it was $1/month extra to be signed up instead of using the code).
The moral is: read your bills very carefully and ask questions of both
the long distance provider and Ameritech. Ameritech generally has the correct
information. Also the highest long distance rates, to pay for them hiring
competent people to answer the phone.
When you sign up for a long distance carrier, call Ameritech to make
sure this goes through properly. I was not told to do so the first time I
signed up with Qwest, which might have been the cause of the problem.
More adventures. Sigrid from Costa Rica has been unable to get phone service for over a week, something to do with her passport? So she bought a calling card. She tried 8 times to call her sister, got busy signal, or just ringing, or nothing at all, and every time they deducted money from her card. I will call for her about this. How do calling cards normally work? Before trying the card, I called Qwest to confirm that if she used the correct access code the call would be 55 cents/minute, 24 hours a day, as they had told me before. The person said no, it would be $1.84 cents/minute because they raise the international rates on lines that are signed up for their US long distance service, but then she gave me a different access code, that was 60 cents/minute from 5-11 pm. The third person I called said you cannot use an access code if you have an account, and it would be $1.84/minute. So I called Telco Dial and Save, and they charge 56 cents/minute plus $3/month to dial without access code. If you want to dial with the access code it is 52 cents/minute. She tried calling and got blank silence. The technical dept. will research the problem and call me back in a few days. Then I called MCI Worldcom. For regular customers they have a special low rate. If you use their access code they said it would be terribly expensive. (The opposite of Qwest). Can anybody recommend a good cheap way to call Costa Rica, that works? Sigrid asked, around 9 pm, if it is often this cold here. Costa Rica is near the equator and has wet and dry seasons.
You might want to try 10-10-220 or 10-10-321 they have bargain rates abroad and they are a non monthly fee service. It depends on what kind of calling card that you have. 1. You can buy a prepaid calling card, which usually has anywhere from 5 mins to 30 minutes on it, and usually costs $10 or so, depending on the time involved. It works like this: 1. You dial a 1-800 number found on the back of the card 2. Enter your PIN found on the back of the card 3. Dial your number and talk for as long as you need to. 4. Hang Up and repeat if additional calls and time permits. These cards can be recharged by anyone with a credit card. 2. A calling card issued by your LDP (Long Distance Provider) usually has a PIN on it, and has a PIN and access number on it. The only difference is that the time is only limited by your credit rating from your LDP. LDP issued calling cards do not need recharging.
Sigrid has neither a phone line (so no provider) nor a credit card. She
bought her card at a local store for $20.What company is 10-10-etc. that you
recommended for overseas calling?
Is it standard practice to charge for busy numbers, or for a minimum
number of minutes?
Usually, you are not charged for busy signals. I think MCI owns 10-10-321 and 10-10-220, but I am not sure. I think 10-10-220 might offer the best deal, however since she has a prepaid card, she must use the company that issued it. Some LDP's charge for 1 minute as a minimum. A solution is to let her use your phone, and then when the bill arrives, have her pay for the call. The phone company will also provide time and charges if you ask for it before you make the call, but then it has to be operator dialed, and they can get expensive. Best thing to do is have her dial 10-10-220 or 10-10-321 from your phone, and then when your bill arrives, have her pay you for the call. If you have a stopwatch, you can time the call yourself, then if you know the rate, you can ballpark the figure if you're in a hurry to be paid back.
Yes, 10-10-321 and 10-10-220 are MCIWorldcom. When I was looking into their International rates a year or so ago they were pretty awful. That may have changed since then.
MCI told me their overseas rates for non customers were terrible.
I wanted to let Sigrid use my phone but we could not find any provider that
worked. She used the calling card out of desperation.
Michigan Connections has calling cards advertising 4 cents/minute to Costa
Rica, which they explain as 200 minutes for $10. (This divides to 5 cents).
Then there is the small print, stating a $2 connection charge for each call.
One 200 minute call costs 4 cents/minute ($8) plus $2 = $10. Five ten minute
calls come to $10 connection charges plus $2, or $12/50 minutes = 24
cents/minute, which is still quite reasonable compared to 52 cents. I think
this saves them the expense of billing customers.
I will call her calling card company Monday with her card number and
they said they would fix the problem of billing $5 for no connection.
The company, Tel3, gave her $2.22 cents credit, stating that is what they charged her. $1 connection fee plus 40 cents/minute and they said she talked one time for one minute. (???) Five ten-minute calls would be $5 plus (at 40 cents/minute) $20 = $25, or twice the cost of Michigan Connection, which comes out even farther ahead for 15 minute calls.
My new phone company Qwest managed to get straight that I had only one account, and that I was being billed by credit card, but they were still charging me $4.95/month fee that credit card billees do not get. The woman said the programmers goofed somewhere and lots of people have been complaining and they are working on it. The last person to fix my account forgot to fix this one feature. They now owe me $25 credit, as they also forgot to give me $5/account credit automatically for the signup fee with Ameritech. I get the impression that all long distance providers automatically forgot to do this unless you remind them. (By the time I work off all this credit, I should be down from 9 to 8.5 cents/month, it drops .5 cents/6 months).
To change long distance providers: 1. Sign up with the new provider. 2. Sign up with Ameritech for the new provider (if you do not, it may take a few weeks to get signed up). 3. Unsign up with the old provider or they will keep billing you $2.49 FCC charges (one retroactive, one proactive). 4. Ask the new provider if they have intraLATA (local toll service). Ask Ameritech the same question. If the answers do not agree keep asking both of them until they do. (Qwest said yes. Ameritech said Qwest was not on their list. Qwest said they were, no they were not. I asked Ameritech for their list and they could only tell me if individual providers were on it. Was Qwest? Yes. I asked Qwest. Yes. Asked Ameritech again. Yes. Signe dup with Qwest. Told Ameritech, who said there was a $5 switchover fee. Called Qwest to ask them to pay the fee (they do not unless you ask). There is a separate fee for interLATA and one for intraLATA. Do not believe everything that any phone company tells you. Ameritech said it was okay for a provider you were not signed up to charge FCC fees. Dial and Save said it was not and they would refund the two months since I stopped using them. Do not believe anyone who promises to call back....... Qwest is 10 cents/min in state, any time, (if you can believe them), no fee if you pay by auto credit card. Now I know why my grandfather always asked directions of strangers three times in a row, or until he got three matching answers. Seems that a lot of people are embarrased to say "I don't know" so make up the answers.
FCC fees are charged to you by the local campany. If your long distance company pays the fee, they may recharge it to you through their monthly fee. You can only be charged one monthly FCC fee per month, but if the billing goes through a circuitous route, it may show up months later. There is a $1.04 charge for not having a selected long distance company. All changes in the long distance carrier are made by the local phone company. The intra-lata(in state) long distance charge has been discontinued. There is no charge to discontinue a carrier. Whenever you talk to the phone company, get the name of the person you are talking to and write it down with the date and time and what you told them to do. Their record keeping is abomiable. You need to keep your own.
Someone (Ameritech?) told me $1.52 for not having a long distance carrier. No point in writing down a name as you can never get hold of the person again. This explains why one of the FCC charges comes two months later. This is still a lot cheaper than when I was growing up and you only made long distance calls for emergencies, or called person to person so as not to pay for the extra two minutes if someone was not there. I recall when I went to New York alone being instructed to call home for myself person to person to let my parents know I had arrived safely. Long distance phone is now one of life's great bargains (e-mail another).
The reason for writing down a name is to be able to verify that you actually talked to someone who was employed there. Using a name and date and time, they can look up the record of your call. If you talk to someone at Ameritech, that record is kept for 3 months.[
If you talk to someone at Dial and Save, their computer is always down and there will not be any record to look up. All they ever do is apologize for what the last person (no longer working there) did not manage to do.
I have in front of my two offers for land-line long distance telephone service, from SBC and AT&T. I'm only interested in one that has no monthly fee as we do almost all our long-distance calling on either cell phones, calling cards, or one of the 10-10 services. However I believe we must pick a land-line long-distance carrier anyway. It *seems* to be no competition between SBC and AT&T - unless I am missing something. This item is for gaining information about long-distance land-line services.
As far as I know you do NOT have to pick a long-distance carrier at all, and you save a bit on phone taxes if you do not. SBC offers cheap rates for the first year but if you read the small print they then go up after that. QWEST starts higher and goes down every 6 months eventually to 5 cents/minute and has no monthly fee. They make 37 cents/month from me and probably lose that much sending me the bill. There is or anyway was a website comparing the various long distance services and at one point Intel charged 4 cents/minute including instate. I pay SBC 7 cents for instate to Detroit, 15 cents to Lansing, or 5 cents to Hawaii or Alaska. I call Hawaii as often as Lansing.
I mean, this thread. Here is the comparison between SBC and ATT, no monthly fee, land-line long-distance services: SBC - "Value Plus Flat Rate" 7-cents per minute. (SBC also throws in a $25 VISA gift card good for 90 days.) AT&T- "Value Rate Plan" Weekday day: 35-cents; weekday eve's: 29.5-cents; weekends: 17-cents (all per minute). SBC seems to have it all over AT&T. Am I interpreting these rates correctly? (We are currently calling long distance with a calling card at 3.5-cents/min or less.)
The above SBC rate is what it goes up to after 12 months. I ignore all temporary promotional offers as I expect I will stick with my choice indefinitely (or until they make significant changes). We want land-line long distance as we have found that cell phones and calling cards become inoperative in some emergencies.
Before you decide check with your cell phone company and see if they can be your long distance carrier for your land line. If so, they may offer you a sweet deal. We have Sprint for our cell phones. As a perk for going with them as our land line long distance carrier too, they wave the monthly access fee of $5.95. So all we pay for is the very rare "emergency" long distance call we make on the POTS line. We'll go months and months with $0 due bills. I think the biggest long distance bill we've had in years and years was something like $24 a few months ago. My sister, the world traveler who has been to some of the most remote corners of the earth, called collect from OTTAWA to get help on getting from Metro Airport to Ann Arbor. COLLECT. I would think someone who's hiked to Everest's base camp, slept on yak dung mattresses in Mongolia, and sailed to the Galapagos Islands could get from Romulus to Ann Arbor, don't ya think? I can forgive almost anything but a collect call. ;-)
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- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss