Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1991 21:28:10 GMT From: Ken Abrams Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: What Was the Real Reason For Change in AT&T Cards? Message-ID: Organization: Athenanet, Inc., Springfield, Illinois Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 467, Message 4 of 9 Lines: 47 In article andys@ulysses.att.com writes: > In article you write: > Obviously, you missed the followup traffic from AT&T people, including > me, on this. AT&T now buys card verification services from the LECs Apparently I did miss some articles. I didn't even see MY post and only realized it had been published when I started receiving mail. > I hope we don't lose you as a customer. Certainly, the new card > should be a plus, not a minus, once you understand what it can do. And > it *CAN* do your local calls. I have received about five mail messages and have seen a couple of posts but so far, nobody has been able to tell me what the "government rules" are which "forced" AT&T to make this change (or so the literature implied). Some folks have been nice enough to tell me what the "real" reasons are for the change. Why were some of those things not mentioned in the announcement instead of the tripe about government rules?? I dislike being deceived even more than I dislike shoddy service! Several people have mentioned that the "old" (LEC) card number will still work for some unknown period of time. If this is true, the (potential) confusion with OCCs will still exist. I strongly suspect that there will be a cut-off for using the old numbers and it will not be in the too distant future. To achieve some of the aforementioned benefits, AT&T must stop accepting the LEC card numbers. After this happens, I suspect the the RBOCs will stop accepting AT&T cards for local calls since they will then be paying to access AT&T's data base for verification. The business benifits for AT&T are fairly obvious; the benefits to the consumer are not quite so obvious, however. As long as I can place a credit card call to my home number by dialing only 4 additional digits, I will stay with AT&T. If, and when, they force me to use the new number, my decision will probably go the other way if I can find a carrier that will let me use my phone number for credit card calls. Ken Abrams nstar!pallas!kabra437 Illinois Bell kabra437@athenanet.com Springfield (voice) 217-753-7965