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From: wmartin@stl-06sima.army.mil (Will Martin)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Billing and Answer Supervision
Message-ID: <5193@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 15 Mar 90 16:45:49 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 175, Message 1 of 9


>Why is it that people are perfectly happy to get non-itemized bills from other
>utilities but not from the phone company?  It's certainly not because of the
>amount of money involved.  The average person's average phone bill is probably
>a lot higher than their water bill, about the same as their electric bill, and
>a lot lower than their gas bill (assuming they heat with gas). 

It is because the *basis* for the billing from the telco is so
different from the billing from the gas or electric company. The
electric company doesn't care what you plug into the sockets, and it
doesn't charge you differently for electricity that runs your stereo
vs. that which cooks your food (though I admit some areas DO have
time-of-day usage differentials in electric bills, so you pay less for
power used at night).

The telco bills you differently depending on multitudinous factors.
And they certainly make mistakes; not only have we all had evidence of
this personally, but many examples have been posted to this group.
There's nothing that keeps you from hooking your own electric meter
inside your house to the incoming line, and computing yur own bills as
a check on the electric-utility's billing. It wouldn't be too
cost-effective, but it would be fairly straightforward. To do the same
for your phone line would require a dedicated computer (probably);
some businesses actually do that and products to do this are marketed.
In order to avoid the expense of doing that, we want information from
the telco as to their basis for charging us. If we are being billed
some large amount for a call to Mozambique, we want to know about it,
not have it buried in and hidden by a message-unit charge total that
happened to be clicking off at 300 per second for that call, as
opposed to once every 10 seconds for a call next door.

Why do the Europeans allow such non-itemized billing when Americans
object?  Because our fundamental attitudes are different.
(Unfortunately, that difference is decreasing as traditional American
anti-government principles deteriorate...) Telcos in Europe tend to be
governmental organizations, like the Deutsche Bundespost, which impose
a great deal more weight on the user and have much less of an attitude
of "serving the customer" than even Ma Bell at her height of monopoly
had.  We've all heard the tales of poor service, waits for months or
years to get phones installed, the ridiculous anti-modem regulations,
etc., in Europe and other areas.  [Almost as bad as in GTE-land...  :-)]

The American attitude tended to be to let the private-enterprise telco
do *almost* anything it wanted, but to beat it about the head and
shoulders now and then with the state or local-area Public Utility
Commissions or equivalents. One aspect of that was to force the telco
to at least *specify* what it was charging us for, even if it could
[in reality] get away with charging us whatever it really wanted to
for those things. Also, there is the simple historic precedent -- if
you'd always been given a detailed breakout of the charges, the
mechanism for collecting and disseminating that data *was* in place,
so it might as well be used, and, if the customer always had received
that info, they expected to continue to receive it. Inertia plays a
big part here, too...

Many years ago, I think in some telephone-hacker publication or
article on phreaks I happened to run across, I read a prediction (or a
hope) that someday the telco would charge you for usage at a flat
rate. Whether you made a long-distance call or a local call, whether
you used conference-call facilities or other exotica, or just called
your Aunt Mabel to chat, you'd pay the same low per-time usage charge.
I *think* this was sort of in the same light as the '50's-era
predictions that nuclear power would make electricity so cheap that it
wouldn't be worth metering, though... :-) This seems to be based on
the theory that the electronics and computers that run the telco
facilities would become so cheap that it wouldn't be worth the effort
of determing what facilities you were using. I think history has shown
that to be incorrect; the billing is moving more and more in the
opposite direction, with the cheap computing facilities being used
first for accounting, in order to identify and bill for more and more
specific things.


Regards, Will
wmartin@st-louis-emh2.army.mil OR wmartin@stl-06sima.army.mil