milazzo@RICE.EDU (Paul Milazzo) (03/03/86)
I recently moved just outside the area served by my previous CO, and
thus had to order new service. At that time I designated the LD
carrier I wanted for each new line. One of the last pieces of mail to
arrive at my old address was a letter from Southwestern Bell announcing
Equal Access (which has been available for ages), and asking me to
designate a default LD carrier for one of my old lines. Since I had
already cancelled service on that line, I simply discarded the letter.
Yesterday the post office forwarded another letter from SWB, this one
telling me I have been "randomly" assigned to AT&T, which will begin
providing +1 service on April 4th. That's pretty amazing, considering
the line has been disconnected for almost six weeks...
At any rate, the letter was accompanied by several interesting pieces
of information, including a brochure explaining "Easy Access" (i.e. 1+)
dialing. The brochure, in standard SWB silly-question/obvious-answer
format, includes the following points, some of which should help to
dispel the notion that all LOCs are trying to "suppress" information
about 10XXX dialing:
Q: Do I have to pick a long-distance company if I don't want
Easy Access Dialing?
A: No. [...] Without Easy Access Dialing, you'll have to dial
a five-digit access code to make most long-distance calls.
If you decide you don't want Easy Access Dialing, you'll
need to notify Southwestern Bell Telephone by calling the
local business office. Then, you'll contact the
long-distance companies for their access codes and to
establish an account, if required.
Q: If I pick a company for Easy Access Dialing, does that mean
I can use only that company for long-distance calls?
A: No, not at all. You may use another long-distance company
by dialing that company's access code before dialing the
number. Long-distance companies can provide you with their
access codes.
Q: Just how will you decide which company I'm assigned to?
A: The assigning to long-distance companies will be done
randomly on a percentage basis. Customers who do not
respond to the first mailing will be assigned to various
long-distance companies based on the number of customers who
picked each long distance company after the first letter.
[...] A computer will randomly select the proper
percentage of customers to be assigned to the various
companies. [...]
In my opinion, the brochure was reasonably informative, and did not
make any attempt to suppress knowledge of 10XXX dialing. Of course,
they did not explicitly mention the 10XXX format. Instead, all of the
documentation refers to "five-digit access codes" supplied by each LD
carrier. This does not strike me as entirely unreasonable, as the
average customer will not know which carriers require you to have an
account, and will thus have to call the carrier anyway.
The letter I received DID include a list of all the carriers from among
which I could choose, and the access code and customer service telephone
number of each. That list included a number of carriers of whom I had
never heard, so for all the 10XXX aficionados out there, I have
reproduced an abbreviated and re-sorted version below. Forgive me if I
incorrectly capitalized anyone's company name; the original list was in
upper case only.
080 Amtel
084 LDS Metromedia Long Distance
085 Westel, Inc.
203 Cytel
220 Western Union Long Distance
222A MCI
222B American Express Expressphone/MCI Dial "1"
222C Sears/MCI Dial "1"
223 TDX Systems, Inc. (for business only)
288 AT&T Long Distance Service
333 US Telecom
366 American Telco, Inc.
444 ALLNET(r) Dial 1 Service
464 Houston Network, Inc.
488 ITT - Longer Distance Service
777A GTE Sprint Direct Dial Service
800 Satelco
824 ATC/Directline
888 SBS Skyline
Paul G. Milazzo
Dept. of Computer Science
Rice University, Houston, TX
Domain: milazzo@rice.EDU, milazzo@rice.ARPA
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