Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Tue, 18 Jun 91 18:25:11 EDT From: andys@ulysses.att.com Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: What Was the Real Reason For Change in AT&T Cards? Message-ID: Organization: TELECOM Digest 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 468, Message 9 of 10 Lines: 92 In article kabra437@athenanet.com (Ken Abrams) writes: > 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! What we all gave you were lots of good reasons for AT&T to start using its own card numbers, even if there were no regulatory considerations. However, there is one. In short, the FCC says we have to issue cards with our own card numbers on them or get out of the card issuing business. Currently, under the terms of Shared Network Access Facility Arrangements (SNAFA) set forth by the FCC, AT&T and RBOCS are allowed to share the database and credit card numbers used for card validation. As of 1/1/92, the SNAFA come to an end, and the RBOCS *MUST* use their own database for their own cards and AT&T *MUST* use its own database for its own cards (or get out of the card business). I think that the RBOCs and AT&T are free to sell each other verification services for calls carried by one and billed to the others card, so an RBOC Calling Card should still be able to be used for AT&T calls, just as your Universal Card can be used for RBOC carried calls. Nobody is deceiving you. Come 1/1/92, any card issued by AT&T must have a different number from a card issued by the LECs. I've not seen the announcement that came with the cards, but I gather it wasn't detailed. But explaining all that stuff in the above paragraph to the general consumer LD marketplace (as opposed to Telecom Digest readers) is not an easy task. If you tell too little you get flamed in the Digest. If you tell too much, you confuse an awful lot of people with information they neither want nor need. The statement that new card numbers are being issued because of new regulatory requirements is complete and accurate. Now, if *I* were writing the enclosure, I'd sure put an "and by the way, you get these benefits as a side effect" paragraph and make it clear that local calls can be charged to the new AT&T card. But that's just a quibble. The enclosure was honest, after all (as I always hoped and expected of my employer). I hope that this can put the deception issue out to pasture once and for all. > 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. As I pointed out to you in private mail, unless the FCC forbids it, I'd imagine that any IXC would want to accept LEC-issued cards to pick up casual business from people who have other Dial-1 carriers. The major business benefits from the new cards in terms of relationships with regular customers still applies. Depending on the nature of the regulations, I doubt that the LECs would stop using AT&T and/or OCC verification services out of pique. They risk pissing off too many people. > 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. In the absence of any regulations, the consumer still benefits from protection against inadvertant AOS billing. Given the volume of customer complaints on this issue, AOS billing to what customers *thought* was and AT&T card is a customer relations problem, not to mention lost revenue. But it is good for the consumers to know that they can control with whom they do business by what card they use, which they cannot with the old cards. But all that is beside the point, in a way. The Feds require the change. This is just why it would be a good thing to do anyway. Andy Sherman/AT&T Bell Laboratories/Murray Hill, NJ AUDIBLE: (908) 582-5928 READABLE: andys@ulysses.att.com or att!ulysses!andys What? Me speak for AT&T? You must be joking! [But the regulatory information did come from reliable sources]