covert@covert.enet.dec.com (John R. Covert 03-Mar-1990 0856) (03/03/90)
>We will accept certain corporate cards (or RAO Cards as we call them) >(RAO = Regional Accounting Office) if the first three digits (Area >Code) belong to Bell South. There are also RAO Cards where the first >three digits do not correspond to an Area Code. Instead, they are >specific RAO Offices that pass their billing to a certain RBOC. For >example, RAO Cards beginning with 694 get billed by New Jersey Bell. >We will not yet accept these cards for several reasons. VoiceMark will not accept my AT&T card which has the South Central Bell RAO 654 as the first three digits. I was shunted to an operator who told me that the card was "out of area" even though it really wasn't. And since it has been pointed out that VoiceMark does accept cards with the N.E.T. RAO 601, it looks like the VoiceMark programmers misinterpreted the spec for calling cards. It used to be that all RAO cards started with zero or one. In fact, the actual RAOs involved are 054 and 001 for the examples above. When automated calling cards were introduced, it was necessary to add 600 to the RAO on the card, since an initial digit of zero brings up the operator and an initial digit of one was reserved for future services (such as the recently implemented automatic collect calls). The actual RAO number didn't change. RAO cards are still unique in one respect (which is why it is possible to have an RAO card from N.E.T. begin with 601, a South Central Bell area code). The exchange prefix on RAO cards will always start with a "1" (or maybe a zero as well), never with 2-9. This is how you can tell whether a card beginning with 601 is from SCB or from NET. BTW, calling RAO cards "Corporate Cards" is a misnomer. RAO cards can be issued to residential customers who ask for a second card number, and those calls will be itemized separately from the calls for other calling cards billed to the same billing number. I'd suggest that the VoiceMark programmers modify their algorithm to look at the first digit of the exchange. Until this is done, I suspect that callers using those 601 N.E.T. cards are getting a free ride (or they may just have their billing delayed until AT&T gets around to establishing contracts with other RBOCS). /john