At the board meeting last night I was given the mission of finding out if
we could reduce the cost of our ISDN lines. It was an interesting
experience.
I called Shirley Russell, who has helped us in the past with our ISDN issues.
Unfortunately I don't know if she's still doing the same thing anymore,
because instead of her I got a woman named Joyce in Wisconsin. Joyce
explained that a lot of the traffic that used to go to Shirley's office in
Saginaw is now going to Wisconsin.
So I told Joyce our story about how our ISDN lines are on our centrex system,
and we think we're paying too much as a result, and we'd like to get a quote
for how much they would cost if they were regular lines (and what the
installation charges would be). She put me on hold several times before
deciding I needed to talk to the "Michigan Special Services" division.
So she transferred me to Jane at Michigan Special Services. Jane listened to
my story, and looked up our account and figured out which of our lines were
the ISDNs. She said she didn't think we'd save any money by taking them off
centrex, but the people I really ought to talk to are at the ISDN Provisioning
Center. So she transferred me.
After going through a couple of "Press one for ..." menus, I got another
woman on the phone and told her our story, though she could barely hear me
because the connection was faint. She didn't waste time looking up our
account, because her office apparently doesn't give out quotes, but only
does hookups. She said I needed to talk to their Team Data division, so
she transferred me.
Then I got Angie at Team Data. She asked me "Why is this connection so
bad? Were you transferred?" And I proceeded to tell her the story of the
8x10 color glossy photos... And she stopped me right there and said Kid,
"Let me call you back."
I gave her my number and she called back, and the line was much better. I
told her our story and she began to look things up. After I told her the name
of our company was Cyberspace Communications, she asked me if we were an ISP.
I was surprised that she asked, and I told her no, we are an online community
based in Ann Arbor with a lot of local users as well as users on the net.
By then she had looked up a price, and she quoted me a monthly rate of $84.24
for our lines, if they weren't on centrex.
Of course the trouble with numbers like that is that it's hard to tell what
they include. I had spent the past 3 days typing our old phone bills into
Excel and breaking them down into their component parts, so I knew that the
total they are costing us now is $124.26 per month. But I didn't know if her
number was comparable to mine. The conversation proceeded something like
this:
Me: "Is that for both lines?"
Angie: "Yes."
Me: "Does that include taxes, and the federal line charge?"
Angie: "No. If you give me your fax number I can send you just what I have
so you can compare it with what you have."
Me: "I'm sorry, I don't have a fax machine. You see, Grex is run by
volunteers; we have a room where we keep the computers, but not an
office."
Angie: "So you're at home?"
Me: "Yes."
Angie: "Well, where are you?"
Me: "Uh... Well, I'm in Ann Arbor."
Angie: "What are your cross streets?"
(I couldn't think why she wanted to know that, so I was imagining that
Ameritech might have some sort of satellite delivery system that could beam
the document from wherever she was right into my home.)
Me: "Well, I'm near the corner of Maple and Pauline."
Angie: "Well I'm near Packard and Stadium, so the document should be able to
get to you by osmosis if not by fax."
Me: "Oh!" (stammering) "You mean I could come over and get it?"
Angie: "Sure."
And she gave me her home address, which is where she works. I brought a disk
with my spreadsheets on it and put it into her laptop, so we could compare my
numbers to hers. I'll post the results in the next response.
I ended up telling her about Grex and showing her our web page. I told her
about the Saturday morning Grexwalks, and she sounded very interested. I
showed her the map Steve Weiss drew to show where we meet in Gallup park, and
she sounded like she might come! I also showed her the ad in the Observer,
where it says that all are welcome.
All in all, I just can't get over the feeling that this was far and away the
best Ameritech experience I have ever had!
18 responses total.
What we're paying now:
Item Num Per Price S Tax F Tax
---- --- --- ----- ----- -----
AETCP offset 2 $0.02 $0.04 $0.00 $0.00 $0.04
ISDN CKT SWITCH DATA B CHAN 4 $7.50 $30.00 $1.80 $0.90 $32.70
ISDN-Circuit Switched Data Ln 4 $7.50 $30.00 $1.80 $0.90 $32.70
2-Wire Loop Assoc WH 2B1Q Line 2 $10.03 $20.06 $1.20 $0.60 $21.87
ISDN Centrex - National 2 $9.85 $19.70 $1.18 $20.88
Federal line charge 2 $5.41 $10.82 $0.65 $0.32 $11.79
ISDN BRI No PIC Federal Charge 4 $0.98 $3.92 $0.24 $0.12 $4.27
------- ----- ----- -------
$114.54 $6.87 $2.85 $124.26
What Angie quoted us:
ISDN direct service 2 $16.00 $32.00
Alt. CSV or data, per 'B' chnl 4 $3.25 $13.00
Network access line area - B 2 $13.04 $26.08
End user common line charge 2 $5.00 $10.00
End user complex line port 2 $1.58 $3.16
------
$84.24
Though the names and numbers are different, Angie thinks that the five lines
on her quote are comparable to the first five lines of what we're paying now.
Let's forget about taxes for the moment, since hopefully we will stop paying
them soon. To make Angie's quote comparable to what we're paying now, we
need to add on the last two lines from above:
Angie's quote $84.24
Federal line charge 2 $5.41 $10.82
ISDN BRI No PIC Federal Charge 4 $0.98 $3.92
------
$98.98
So the bottom line is that when the taxes go away, we'll be paying $114.54
per month, but we could save $15.56 per month by taking those lines off the
centrex.
*However*, it will cost us $244 in installation charges to do so. That means
it will be 16 months before we recoup the cost of installation and start
saving money. And, though it is quite inconsequential, we would have to pay
for calls between our two ISDN lines if they were not on centrex. The rate
would be the same as for regular local calls, $.0852 per call.
BTW Angie also gave me the URL for Team Data - it's
http://www.ameritech.com/teamdata
and if you select "Online Electronic Information" followed by
"Over 100 documents online", you can find rate information for ISDN lines.
Those Federal charges are taxes, aren't they?
The federal line charge is not a tax, I don't think. One reason I think so is that we pay tax on it! (Both federal and state.) So I don't think it will go away.
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oldcoop 124 <--> newcoop 15.
So far no one seems to appreciate the humor in the situation I described in #0. Perhaps you had to be there. :)
We both found it hilarious. But your experience at least ended better than
ours, the week or so we tried to get information on how to wire our phone to
use the party line that they were forced to sell us. (Finally a field worker
told us to request tip instead of ring, or vice versa, and just use the phones
as they came, after endless 'we are not allowed to give out that
information's when we wanted wiring information.)
Thanks for all the time and energy you are putting into this, as well
as for sharing your adventures in such lucid prose.
Jim says he enjoyed it. He is trying to explain to me what centrex
means. 'Centrex is a PBS, I assume'. (Thanks, Jim, what is a PBS? PBX...)
What was the original advantage to having centrex, he asks.
I don't think I am being charged a minimum fee, but there is still some
sort of monthly fee for having the long distance service (which I hope is less
than the fee was for not havin.) Dial and Save (Telco) gives you the choice
of $3/month and all calls for 10 cents/min, or no fee and 15 cents/min during
business hours. Should I try to figure out if there is a fee exceeding the
fee for not having long distance service?
PBX stands for Private Brance eXchange. It's the sort of phone system lots of companies have, which generally has an internal each phone and then some much smaller number of outside lines that get assigned to a phone automatically when there is an incoming or outgoing call. If you call somebody and get one of those menus (press 1 for sales, etc.) you are calling through a PBX. PBX's also usually have lots of other cool features, such as letting people within the company call eachother with extention numbers, without having to get the phone company involved, and letting people transfer calls around easily. Centrex could probably best be described as a virtual PBX. It does not involve any additional equipment in your building, as it is entirely handled in hte phone switch. From a practical standpoint it is a bunch of individual phone lines, set up such that you can call other lines in your Centrex system by dialing an extention number (usually the last 3-5 digits of the phone number), forward calls around, do conferencing within the Centrex fairly easily, program your own hunt group order, place restrictions on which lines can make what sorts of phone calls, and all sorts of other stuff that would otherwise require a PBX. From Grex's perspective, there are two important benefits to Centrex. One is that we can block outgoing calls on the modem lines as a security measure, and the other is that after some number of lines Centrex becomes slightly cheaper than regular lines.
Why do you want to block outgoing calls?
We want to be absolutely sure that no one can exploit some (unknown) security hole and dial out on one of our modems.
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https://www.usabestnet.com/realdeal/wwnet/
This response has been erased.
Ah! I made a mistake with the numbers I posted in #1. It appears that they
were correct through February, but starting in March one of those 7.50x4
charges went away. Since the difference was $30, which is divisible by 15, I
had assumed the change was a decreas in the rate of our regular lines, but
I got someone at Ameritech to break down our bill for me today, and discovered
that I was wrong. The upshot is that the correct numbers for what we're
paying now are:
Item Num Per Price S Tax F Tax
---- --- ------ ------ ----- -----
AETCP offset 2 $0.02 $0.04 $0.00 $0.00 $0.04
ISDN CKT SWITCH DATA B CHAN 4 $7.50 $30.00 $1.80 $0.90 $32.70
2-Wire Loop Assoc WH 2B1Q Line 2 $10.03 $20.06 $1.20 $0.60 $21.87
ISDN Centrex - National 2 $9.85 $19.70 $1.18 $0.00 $20.88
Federal line charge 2 $5.42 $10.84 $0.65 $0.33 $11.82
ISDN BRI No PIC Federal Charge 4 $0.98 $3.92 $0.24 $0.12 $4.27
$84.56 $5.07 $1.95 $91.58
So it looks like we are actually paying less than what Angie quoted me.
Well, it has been a year and a half, and things don't seemed to have changed at Ameritech. I swore I would never call them again after the caller-id incident. begin-rant I saw a TV add for free caller-id, but the number wasn't on the screen long enough for me to decide that I wanted it, get my pen out, and write it down. Called Ameritech. They didn't know the number, but at least "we really should have that". Many transfers later, still no luck, and a very bad connection. The lady says she will call me back. The pleasant superize was that someone did, and in under five minutes. The unpleasant superizesuperize was that this connection was even worse than the previous one. It got worse. I was talking to the right place, but the guy was brain-dead by Ameritech standards. He kept asking me if I wanted it shipped to my billing address. I'd say no. Well, shout it actually, bad connection. He would then ask where I wanted it. I would say "my service address". He would then ask where that is. I would tell him. I lost count of how many times we went through the loop. The thing arrived in about a week. At my billing address. I felt lucky to get it, as it was addressed to a hybrid which had the number and street from one place, and the city and zip code from the other. Good thing they picked the small town. Back to the present. I'm now working on finding a copy of the tariff, on the theory that reading it will be easier than talking to Ameritech. At one point they transfered me to the "special needs center". Not a bad guess, as there is a miss-print in the phone book which has "TTY" instead of "TDD". The people there where nice, polite, knew what I was talking about, and played me a recording that said in part "we are sorry to have to transfer you back", and "if they try to transfer you back to us, ask to speak with a supervisor". All the Ameritech people ended there part with "thank-you for calling Ameritech", but the tone was "why do people keep calling the wrong place" End-of-Rant Question for Aruba, or anyone: Did you get Angie's phone number? If so, how classified is it? What exactly are "AETCP offset", "End user common line", ... I hate to ask, but I think the answer to my Ameritech question is in there some where. It looks like Grex has "switched ISDN" service. Wouldn't "direct ISDN" be cheaper? For one thing the "no pick" charge ought to go away.
**ROFL** Oh, man, stop it, I'm in a library! *giggle*
You have several choices: