briang@eng.sun.com (Brian Gordon) (02/16/91)
An interesting revelation today. I looked into a PacBell personal 800 number, since my wife and I do quite a bit of calling-card calling home from around the region. The base cost is $5/mo (no set-up fee for orders during the first few months). For the local service area, you are billed at rates like $0.183 per minute day, $0.125 evening, $0.10 night and weekends. If you call enough, the rates go down. So far, so good. You must also select a long distance carrier. My first choice was AT&T, hoping that these calls would combine with other lines for the Reach Out America discounts. First bad news -- no -- that bill is completely separate and they claim it can't be combined with anything else. The disaster, though, is that they want $15 a month for the service, used or not!! For the calls that go through them, it is $0.22 per minute, in one minute increments, around the clock. Sufficient useage lowers the rate. No setup fee. In contrast, US Sprint also has no setup fee, but has no monthly charge, and charges $0.2006 (day), $0.1873 (evening) and $0.1443 (night and weekend) per minute with a six second increment. That is, their highest rate is lower than AT&T's lowest (OK, constant) rate. Again, over four hours in a month lowers the rate. It does seem that AT&T doesn't want the business ...