roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (03/14/90)
In <5087@accuvax.nwu.edu> Jim Shankland <jas@llama.rtech.com> writes: > the monthly phone bill listed *only* the number of message units consumed > that month, and the corresponding total amount to pay; there was no > itemization of calls. You pretty much had to take their word for it that > you'd consumed that many message units; none of this, "But sir/ma'am, I > never called Bremerhaven last Thursday" stuff. And how is that any different from the typical electric, water, or natural gas bill? In a typical house, each of these items is metered and once a month you get a bill saying "according to our meter, you used XXX kWH of electricity, and you own us $YYY". What would the electric company say if I called them up and said "But sir/ma'am, I didn't even run my air conditioner this month, how could I possibly have used that much?" Why is it that people are perfectly happy to get non-itemized bills from other utilities but not from the phone company? It's certainly not because of the amount of money involved. The average person's average phone bill is probably a lot higher than their water bill, about the same as their electric bill, and a lot lower than their gas bill (assuming they heat with gas). Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016 roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy "My karma ran over my dogma"
urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de (Matthias Urlichs) (03/15/90)
In comp.dcom.telecom, article <5087@accuvax.nwu.edu>, Jim Shankland <jas@llama.rtech.com> writes: < In article <5016@accuvax.nwu.edu> David Lesher <wb8foz@mthvax.cs.miami.edu> < writes: < >According to some friends I visited in Frankfurt, the telephone < >administration charges for off-hook time. They don't care if it is < >ringing, busy or hung at the switch. Not in Germany. Some other European contries, like Austria, have that problem. < That certainly wasn't the case when I was growing up in Munich. < Billing was done in "message units", which at the time cost 0.18 DM < each. A (completed) local call cost one message unit, regardless of < its length. Toll calls were charged in seconds per message unit, < rather than money per minute. The phone company (== post office) < started counting message units when the connection was established. Today, the unit is 0.23 DM. They recently dropped the general 1% rebate (for wrong connections and general non-reliability). Local calls now cost one unit per eight minutes (12 minutes, 18-8 o'clock). Most long-distance calls are 15 (38 4/7) seconds per unit -- about DM 55 (21), or US$ 30 (12), per hour. < Oh, yes: the monthly phone bill listed *only* the number of message < units consumed that month, and the corresponding total amount to pay; < there was no itemization of calls. You pretty much had to take their < word for it that you'd consumed that many message units; none of this, < "But sir/ma'am, I never called Bremerhaven last Thursday" stuff. The technology still isn't there. Almost everywhere, you can't even get touch tone dialling. But even where they have fairly modern technology, you can't get a list of the numbers dialled, this being justified by the magic word "privacy". Nonsense -- hell, it's _my_ phone line and bill! (The same reasoning is applied to the Telecom (new name for the wiry part of the Bundespost)-operated X.25 network.) Matthias Urlichs
peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) (03/15/90)
> What would the electric company say if I called them up and said "But > sir/ma'am, I didn't even run my air conditioner this month, how could > I possibly have used that much?" Actually, if you have reason to believe that your bill is in error they are happy to work with you to figure it out. They're selling you kWH, and if you didn't get them you're entitled to a refund. The phone company is selling you bandwidth. If you don't get it, then you're entitled to a refund. > Why is it that people are perfectly happy to get non-itemized > bills from other utilities but not from the phone company? Because it's not technically feasible to get non-itemised bills from other utilities, perhaps? What would an itemised bill from the power company look like? "Refrigerator: $27.75, A/C: $57.21, ..."? _--_|\ `-_-' Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. <peter@ficc.uu.net>. / \ 'U` \_.--._/ v
stank@cbnewsl.ATT.COM (Stan Krieger) (03/15/90)
> > the monthly phone bill listed *only* the number of message units consumed > > that month, and the corresponding total amount to pay; there was no > > itemization of calls. > And how is that any different from the typical electric, > water, or natural gas bill? In a typical house, each of these items > is metered and once a month you get a bill saying "according to our > meter, you used XXX kWH of electricity, and you own us $YYY". > Why is it that people are perfectly happy to get non-itemized > bills from other utilities but not from the phone company? There are simple answers to this question. The first is that, unlike the gas or electric utilties, there are cases where the phone company will refund the charges after usage (i.e., wrong numbers) or not charge at all for usage (i.e., no answer or busy). Thus, the only way to determine if, in fact, these charges were not posted is to have a fully itemized list. The water company doesn't refund charges due to a non-seating of the toilet valve, nor does the electric company when you leave the refrigerator door open. The second is that immediate access to billing information for water, electricity, and gas is available. If you, for example, want to see how many KWH the electric company is billing you for your airconditioner, just take meter readings two hours before, one hour before, when you turn the A/C on, and one and two hours after. The difference in averages is mostly the A/C usage. The bottom line is that we are not taking the water, electric, etc. company's word for it when we get their bill, as we can independently audit all the information that they're basing their bill on, but we are taking the phone company's word for it. As an aside, about 22 years ago, NY Telephone got a tariff to provide detailed billing for message unit calls (there is no unlimited local service in New York City; message unit calls, from 1 to 6 for the initial period with 1 message unit calls being untimed, cover Nassau County (Long Island), all of New York City, and the southern part of Westchester County, including Yonkers, Rye, and White Plains). Where NY Tel really socked it to anyone who wanted the service was that the minimum for a call would be 2 message units. Now, that might have been okay, but all calls billed as 2 message units, including those to one message unit areas, would be timed (1 message unit every 3 minutes after the first 5 minutes). Needless to say, this service was not very popular. Stan Krieger Summit, NJ ...!att!attunix!smk
gmc@mvuxr.att.com (Glenn M Cooley) (03/15/90)
>And how is that any different from the typical electric, >water, or natural gas bill? Because unlike the telephone, each of these has a meter which I can read, measure, and verify my bill with. In fact, with my water bill, I read the meter and send the numbers into the water company (they check every so many years to adjust any discrepencies/deceit). And if I wanted, I could use a one cubic foot bucket to verify or show that the meter is or isn't ripping me off. But when the TELCO tells me to pay up for 15 message units, how do I know this is correct and if it isn't correct how do I prove it. Given the proven abusive nature of such companies I wouldn't be surprised is their computers are "accidentally" overcharging people.
wmartin@stl-06sima.army.mil (Will Martin) (03/16/90)
>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
kaufman@neon.stanford.edu (Marc T. Kaufman) (03/16/90)
In article <5127@accuvax.nwu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 169, Message 8 of 10
. 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).
Because there is less possibility of fraud. It's not real likely that
the kid down the block can charge his TV usage to my electric bill.
Marc Kaufman (kaufman@Neon.stanford.edu)john@bovine.ati.com (John Higdon) (03/16/90)
roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: > And how is that any different from the typical electric, > water, or natural gas bill? In a typical house, each of these items > is metered and once a month you get a bill saying "according to our > meter, you used XXX kWH of electricity, and you own us $YYY". What > would the electric company say if I called them up and said "But > sir/ma'am, I didn't even run my air conditioner this month, how could > I possibly have used that much?" Perhaps you are making a good argument for the itemiztion of electric and water bills. Maybe it could be done by usage on each day. Last year, a client received a bill from PG&E (Pacific Graft & Extortion), the local power company for approximately three times the normal amount. This was for electrical consumption at their mountain top transmitter site. The site demand is 20KW day after day, year after year. I explained this to PG&E who insisted that their meter could not possibly be in error. Had we perhaps left something on inadvertently? Had someone connected up an extension cord on the hill to steal power? I asked the person if he was serious; the electrical service couldn't withstand three time the normal draw! Not only that, but their own meter showed the month's peak demand at 20KW. The figures didn't work out. I had to meet them at the site, where they swapped meters and all the while told me that this was stupid since their meters were never wrong. The long and the short of it is that the bills went back to normal. Think how much easier this could have been if there had been some detail to dispute. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@bovine.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !
Jeremy Grodberg <jgro@apldbio.com> (03/16/90)
In article <5127@accuvax.nwu.edu> roy@phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes: >In <5087@accuvax.nwu.edu> Jim Shankland <jas@llama.rtech.com> writes: >> the monthly phone bill listed *only* the number of message units consumed >> that month, and the corresponding total amount to pay; there was no >> itemization of calls. You pretty much had to take their word for it that >> you'd consumed that many message units; none of this, "But sir/ma'am, I >> never called Bremerhaven last Thursday" stuff. > And how is that any different from the typical electric, >water, or natural gas bill? [...] > Why is it that people are perfectly happy to get non-itemized >bills from other utilities but not from the phone company? [...] Speaking for myself, I can say that I am willing to put up with the utility bills on that basis because I can see the meter, I can see the wires or pipes on my side of the meter, and I trust the utility companies to have aaccurate meters (and if they weren't accurate, how would I know, anyway). The system is too simple for much to go wrong. I don't have to worry about someone on the other side of the country running their toster oven and charging it to my electric bill. Even when things go wrong, it is usually not the utility's fault, rather it is usually some cretin (read Landlord) who is tapping my electric lines to power the hall lights, or the elevator, or something, not an error in billing. The few billing errors I have heard of were simply errors of misreading the meters, and they are usually cleared up quickly and easily. (When a residence gets a bill for $4,000,000,000 worth of electricity used in one month [because the incorrect reading was lower than the last correct reading, so the computer thought it spun around], people at the utility are usually willing to believe that it was their mistake.) As a practical matter, I pretty much accept on faith that my local phone bill is accurate. I have never seen a local call on my bill which I could show was billed incorrectly. It is only the long-distance and monthly charges which cause problems, because of the complicated ways these charges can be generated, and the corresponding increased chance of error. (No flames or horror stories about mistakes in local billing, please.) But since I have yet to go 24 months without finding an error in my long-distance billing, I demand to see it itemized.
ben@hpcvlx.cv.hp.com (Benjamin Ellsworth) (03/16/90)
> Why is it that people are perfectly happy to get non-itemized > bills from other utilities but not from the phone company? Well actually I am not perfectly happy, *but* unlike the telephone, I can go out and get daily readings off of my meters if I want to. I have access to exactly the same data that is going to go into the billing system. If things start getting weird, I can experiment and watch the effects in "real time" on my account balance. Given this level of control and information. I can discover how my use habits affect my cost and make intelligent decisions on how to change my use patterns. If all I got was a single bill, I wouldn't be able to tell if I was making too many calls to grandma or too many calls to my brother. > 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). We may not be average, but at our house the phone bill is almost the highest in the "utility" category. It's really not very high (in the $60 range), but our other bills are lower. Benjamin Ellsworth | ben@cv.hp.com | INTERNET Hewlett-Packard Company | {backbone}!hplabs!hp-pcd!ben | UUCP 1000 N.E. Circle | (USA) (503) 750-4980 | FAX Corvallis, OR 97330 | (USA) (503) 757-2000 | VOICE All relevant disclaimers apply.
Steve Forrette <c186aj@cory> (03/16/90)
In article <5127@accuvax.nwu.edu> Roy Smith writes: >In <5087@accuvax.nwu.edu> Jim Shankland <jas@llama.rtech.com> writes: >> the monthly phone bill listed *only* the number of message units consumed >> that month, and the corresponding total amount to pay; there was no >> itemization of calls. You pretty much had to take their word for it that >> you'd consumed that many message units; none of this, "But sir/ma'am, I >> never called Bremerhaven last Thursday" stuff. > And how is that any different from the typical electric, >water, or natural gas bill? It's different because with an electric or gas bill, billing problems can be resolved easily by looking at the meter (it's even CPE :-) ). If there's a reading or billing error, you have the ultimate proof that you are right. I would imagine that these are quite accurate. On the other hand, I'm sure we've all had billing problems of one sort or another with "the phone company." By its very nature it's more prone to error. Where would you be if you didn't get detailed billing?
tanner@ki4pv.uucp (03/17/90)
) [ differentiate between metered, non-itemized billing from the
) phone co and metered, non-itemized billing from the power co ]
Easy. In the cases of the power, gas, and water bills, you are
receiving a fungible commodity. With the phone bill, you can not
reasonably assert that <n> local calls may be interchanged with the
call to Brazil, and you must make this assertion or the idea of
metered, non-itemized billing is inappropriate.
Further, I can verify the readings on the meters for the power, gas,
and water by examining my meters. I can, if it pleases me, go out and
watch the dials turn and verify that they are turning at the right
rate. I can install my own meter (after the company's meter) if it
pleases me. You can not, in principle, do this with the phone.
...!{bikini.cis.ufl.edu allegra bpa uunet!cdin-1}!ki4pv!tannerVance Shipley <vances@xenitec.on.ca> (03/17/90)
My question is who is getting answer supervision provided all the way back to the PBX? I know of several people in different areas of the US that are. This allows optimal billing back of calls. So, who is getting it? Who is providing it, and how? (T-1,ISDN-PRA,or analog) vances
hrs1@cbnewsi.ATT.COM (herman.r.silbiger) (03/18/90)
For those subscribers to PTTs which only bill in message units who want to check on their bills, or perhaps know how much each call costs, the PTT will rent you a device with a counter. This counter will give you the unit counts, and you can then check the bill at the end of the month. By the way, a non-trivial fraction of your cost of telephone service, both local area and inter-LATA, is due to the cost of billing. Herman Silbiger
Miguel_Cruz@ub.cc.umich.edu (03/19/90)
Jim Gottlieb writes: > A lot of these problems stems from the fact that telcos will normally > refuse to give answer supervision except to real carriers. I have > never quite understood why. What do they have to lose by providing > it? > But since they will not provide any indication of when a called number > has answered, most private telephone systems have no choice but to > establish a time period, after which, they assume the call has been > answered. The University of Michigan's otherwise inept phone system (medium to large, phone number range covers around 40,000 #'s, but I don't know how many are actually in use) has had answer supervision from Michigan Bell for about a year. I noticed accidentally when I flashed before a call was answered and I didn't get a second dial tone. But I tested and sure enough, it works. That's good, I guess, from the phone company (UMTel) that didn't recognize standard touch tones properly for its first three years of existence. Also, come to think of it, the phone company that for years let anyone place free, unbilled calls to anywhere in the world from any phone, including public courtesy phones, by prefacing the call with the obscure (yeah, right) sequence '15'. Miguel Cruz Miguel_Cruz@ub.cc.umich.edu [>- Opinions? Bah. These are FACTS. -<]
Matthias Urlichs <urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de> (03/19/90)
In comp.dcom.telecom, article <5289@accuvax.nwu.edu>,
hrs1@cbnewsi.ATT.COM (herman.r.silbiger) writes:
< For those subscribers to PTTs which only bill in message units who
< want to check on their bills, or perhaps know how much each call
< costs, the PTT will rent you a device with a counter. This counter
< will give you the unit counts, and you can then check the bill at the
< end of the month.
One problem is that this counter is incremented by a high-frequency
beep (16 kHz?), so you can't run a "normal" modem on that line. (MNP
and/or PEP is OK.)
One might assume that 16 kHz should not disturb modems, which use
lower frequencies. Unfortunately, the PTT plays some dirty games with
the line to make sure that the beep is not propagated to the other
end.
The other problem is that this counter has absolutely zero legal
significance. You say "Did not", PTT says "Did too", and that ends
the argument.
If there's a real problem with billing, it usually takes lots of phone
calls to convince them that something may indeed be wrong, and then
they will send you a crew of repairmen (one at a time) to test your
installation (consisting of calling the line test machine (which
pronounces the line OK), asking some non-pertinent questions, and
leaving) before they even think of searching for the bug at their
side. :-( And we have not even talked about trying to get part of your
money back. :-( :-(
< By the way, a non-trivial fraction of your cost of telephone service,
< both local area and inter-LATA, is due to the cost of billing.
This statement, unfortunately, makes sense.
Matthias Urlichstell@oscar.cs.unc.edu (Stephen Tell) (03/20/90)
In article <5289@accuvax.nwu.edu> hrs1@cbnewsi.ATT.COM (herman.r.silbiger) writes: >For those subscribers to PTTs which only bill in message units who >want to check on their bills, or perhaps know how much each call >costs, the PTT will rent you a device with a counter. This counter >will give you the unit counts, and you can then check the bill at the >end of the month. >Herman Silbiger How can such a device work on a system where the PTT's counter runs at different rates depending on distance, time of day, and so on? I think this is a fundamental diference between the telephone and other utilities that no one has explicitly mentioned yet. The phone company would have to provide you with a (rather large) database of billing rates for various destinations and times for you to do your own billing as a check. On the other hand, one could easily buy a bunch of electric meters and attach them to large appliances to itemize their own electric bill. Steve Ciarcia built a device some years ago in _Byte_ to send a certain number of pulses per kilowatt hour to a PC which counted them. I would expect to be able to buy a similar device somewhere. Indeed the electric company could concievably sell such a service, with remote telemetering meter modules to provide itemized billing. With electric power, the maximum number of rates I can think of a single customer having to contend with is peak/off-peak and low/high power factor, for a total of four. With telephone service, there are a lot more different rates that might be charged and therefore must keep track of in order to do your own billing. Steve Tell tell@wsmail.cs.unc.edu CS Grad Student, UNC Chapel Hill. Former chief engineer, Duke Union Community Television, Durham, NC.
Daniel Karrenberg <dfk@mcsun.eu.net> (03/20/90)
tell@oscar.cs.unc.edu (Stephen Tell) writes: >How can such a device work on a system where the PTT's counter runs at >different rates depending on distance, time of day, and so on? In the systems based on message units the local exchange (sometimes the toll exchange but never mind the details) will figure out to which charge band you are calling. As soon as call supervision indicates the call is completed it will send 16kHz pulses down the subscriber line. The pulses are spaced according to the tariff applying to the call. The pulses will reach a meter at the local exchange associated with your line. These meters (at least in Germany) mostly still are mechanical counters arranged in blocks of (I think) 25x25 which are photographed once a month. The photographs are used to key the meter counts into the billing system manually (believe it or not). Call supervision works on all national and most international calls. Some areas of the UK are a notable exception. In these cases you get billed for the ringing and there is nothing you can do about it. If you want a meter at home, the PTT whill remove the lowpass filter that blocks the 16kHz pulses and -voila- your meter starts ticking. Last time I saw them they were mechanical counters attached to a simple LC filter circuit. I am now living in the Netherlands and here they sell you counters with LCD displays. You can strap the unit price with jumpers and read them off in real $$s. Before anyone asks: Yes there is plenty of room for inflation in the design. :-) Daniel Karrenberg Future Net: <dfk@cwi.nl> CWI, Amsterdam Oldie Net: mcsun!dfk The Netherlands Because It's There Net: DFK@MCVAX
David Dyer-Bennet <ddb@ns.network.com> (03/21/90)
In article <5265@accuvax.nwu.edu> tanner@ki4pv.uucp writes:
:Further, I can verify the readings on the meters for the power, gas,
:and water by examining my meters. I can, if it pleases me, go out and
:watch the dials turn and verify that they are turning at the right
:rate. I can install my own meter (after the company's meter) if it
:pleases me. You can not, in principle, do this with the phone.
In England, which uses non-itemized message-unit billing, it is
possible (though not normal) to get phones with a "message unit" meter
right on them. I've run into them in short-term rental situations,
where the people staying in a house want phone service, but it's
different people each week. With this setup, the landlord can come by
and check the phone meter and add your phone bill into the total when
you leave.
This is not meant to refute your basic point at all, particularly
since it's not the normal setup and most likely costs extra. But, *in
principle*, you can do most of this (not connecting your own meter)
with the phone system.
David Dyer-Bennet, ddb@terrabit.fidonet.org
or ddb@network.com
or Fidonet 1:282/341.0, (612) 721-8967 9600hst/2400/1200/300
or terrabit!ddb@Lynx.MN.Org, ...{amdahl,hpda}!bungia!viper!terrabit!ddbmacy@cwjcc.ins.cwru.edu (03/21/90)
In article <5267@accuvax.nwu.edu> X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 179, Message 8 of 12 vances writes: >My question is who is getting answer supervision provided all the way >back to the PBX? I know of several people in different areas of the US >that are. This allows optimal billing back of calls. Most BOC's will not give answer supervsion (aka reverse battery) for any reason. They simply refuse to tarriff it. Most COCOT vendors (the ones that try to be legit, anyway) would kill for answer supervision. Murder, however, is regarded negatively by the BOC's. Many non-Bell telcos will give it, some by tarriff, some not. I got GTE Ohio to give it to me on my ground start PBX trunks by making arrangments with local managment. (I still cannot believe they did it) Ohio Bell says "no tarriff, not available". If you are a governmental agency or other large user, "special arrangement" tarriffs are used to get it. When the connections to the long distance carrier are direct and do not use telco provided switching equipment, answer supervision can be obtained from most long distance carriers upon special arrangment. This usually involves the use of a T1 feed for higher volume users. Note that AT&T does not like to provide answer supervision (seems odd to me) on Megacom. Now: if the telco won't give us answer supervision, why should we have to provide it to the telco by tarriff on DID lines? ;-) In article <5194@accuvax.nwu.edu> X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 175, Message 2 of 9 [ Several discussions of various types of itemized and non-itemized billings deleted to prevent boredom....] Actually GTE Mobilnet may have the whole thing figured out for us: They charge an additional $2.25 per month to render an itemized bill (in the Cleveland-Akron market, at least) for their cellular telephone service. I'm not sure if I agree with this or not ... but at least there is a choice. Macy M. Hallock, Jr. macy@NCoast.ORG uunet!aablue!fmsystm!macy F M Systems, Inc. {uunet!backbone}!cwjcc.cwru.edu!ncoast!fmsystm!macy 150 Highland Drive Voice: +1 216 723-3000 Ext 251 Fax: +1 216 723-3223 Medina, Ohio 44256 USA Cleveland:273-3000 Akron:239-4994 (Dial 251 at tone) (Please note that our system name is "fmsystm" with no "e", .NOT. "fmsystem")