Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!chinacat!telecom-gateway From: john@zygot.ati.com (John Higdon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: My First Experience With Stupid LD Carriers Message-ID: Date: 30 Nov 89 06:29:41 GMT Sender: news@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG Organization: Green Hills and Cows Lines: 60 Approved: telecom-request@chinacat.lonestar.org X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 540, message 5 of 7 In article , wcf@hcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) writes: > They asked me which long-distance carrier I wanted: ITT or AT&T. Well, > I chose ITT, just for the heck of it; I never expected to make many long > distance calls. The line was for my computer, which was running a BBS, > and why in the world would a BBS make outgoing calls? That, of course, was > before I discovered FidoNet. Now my BBS makes several long-D calls a month. > [story of major billing errors and screwups, deleted] Let your story be a lesson for those who agonize over selecting a long distance carrier when, in fact, they make few long distance calls. The first question that comes to mind is, "Was the savings provided by ITT over AT&T worth what you ended up going through with all your billing hassles?" Yes, AT&T is probably not the cheapest LD carrier available, but it is certainly one of the best and most trouble-free. If you make few long distance calls, I can't imagine what would prompt you to use someone else. > I said I was satisfied with that, and then he transferred me to ITT to > set up an account. After being put through that kind of ringer, why on earth would you want an account? So you could get all that erroneous billing more quickly? > The practice of charging after 45 seconds of ringing is > pretty ridiculous, as far as I'm concerned. Do other carriers do > this? Not any more. If this is your calling pattern, it would seem that ITT is not going to work for you. All of the major carriers now have answer supervision. > As far as I can tell, ITT's rates are about 2/3 of AT&T's, at > least for the calls that I have been making. Anyone have another > carrier to suggest? Relatively inexpensive, doesn't do stupid things, > etc. 2/3 of AT&T's Reach-out America plan, for instance? If your traffic wouldn't warrant any such plan, then savings from a cheap-tone long distance company aren't going to be really significant anyway. This is not a personal attack, but I am constantly amazed when people automatically go for an "alternate" LD carrier 'cause it's cheaper and then are dumbfounded when they find that the product is inferior. "Cheap" long distance will frequently net you erroneous billing, poor customer service, poor connection time, and sometimes bad tranmission. One of my UUCP neighbors and I did a little experiment. We tested a number of LD carriers for throughput. The Telebit Trailblazer will automatically send at a rate commensorate with the quality of the phone line. To make a long story a little shorter, it came out something like this: AT&T and Sprint were about neck and neck (Sprint just a bit faster) and Telesphere consistently had less than 50% of the data rate. Rates on Telesphere are about 2/3 AT&T. In this instance, which is the better deal? Price isn't everything. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !