Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!texbell!attctc!vector!telecom-gateway From: gkj@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Gregory K Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: AT&T's ACUS Service Message-ID: Date: 8 Nov 89 20:32:42 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: Gregory K Johnson Organization: Columbia University Lines: 48 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 501, message 1 of 9 In article rmadison@euler.berkeley. edu (Linc Madison) writes: >In article Bill Fenner >(wcf@hcx.psu.edu) writes: >>AT&T announced a new service at Penn State's University Park campus >>this fall, called ACUS long-distance service. With this service, each >>student gets their own PSC (Personal Security Code). The PSC >>identifies the student, no matter which room he is calling from.... >This sounds very similar to the system used in the dorms at >UC-Berkeley, although my understanding was that it was more the >University than the telco or LD Co that put this into place. There >was one HUGE hitch: if you ever accepted a collect call, you were hit >with a HEFTY surcharge, to the tune of $20 or some such absurdity, to >cover the administrative cost of manually assigning the charge to your >account. At Columbia University, ACUS administers the billing for our ROLM PBX campus phone system. I have the following complaints about it, some of which have to do with ROLM I think more than ACUS, but I find the ACUS people much more difficult to deal with than New York Telephone or any other local phone company. 1. They will charge $5 to accept a collect call, because it requires a human clerk to handle the billing. 2. They will cut off your service when either (a) you are more than 5 days late in paying it or (b) you go over some pre-set credit limit. You get no warning if either of these conditions is imminent, and it takes *over two weeks* in some cases to reactivate service because the only way to get it back is to mail them a check and wait for them to get around to processing it. 3. Due to the problem in (1), they will not allow calls to 976, 1-900, or any other exchanges which have special billing arrangements. 4. They do not provide supervised billing. While they will give you credit for uncompleted calls, they will admonish you not to let the phone ring more than *six times* or you will be billed for the call. This is ridiculous and I tell them so every time I have to call them to get credit for my dozen or so uncompleted calls. In conclusion, ACUS sucks and so does ROLM. Get a standard phone line if you can. Greg Johnson