roy@uunet.uu.net (Roy M. Silvernail) (10/14/89)
Last week, voters in Anchorage turned back an attempt by the Mayor to sell our telephone utility to Pacific Telecom. (Anchorage Telephone Utility is reported to be the last Muni-owned phone company in the U.S.) The publicity fight was intense, and pretty one-sided from PTI's 1 million dollar ad budget. As a result of debating the issue (I campaigned against the sale), I have had lots of requests for information. One of the possibilities raised was restructuring of rates and instituting measured service to gain an effective rate increase in the face of promises to hold the line. I'd like to get some input from the net... Do you have measured service? What are the actual rates? Do you have to juggle zones? Do you have a free-call area? If you were there for the beginning of measured service, what was the introduction like? (was there a public outcry? Was the public even consulted?) Anecdotes are welcome, too. Please e-mail to save bandwidth, and I'll summarize and send it to Patrick for consideration. For the record, PTI owns 62 local Alaskan wireline providers and Alascom, the state's only in-state long-distance company. One of the biggest arguments against the sale was that PTI (based in Vancouver, Washington) would have attained 80% ownership of Alaska's phone service. Roy M. Silvernail | UUCP: uunet!comcon!roy | "Life in the arctic is no picnic" [ah, but it's my account... of course I opine!] -touristy T-shirt SnailMail: P.O. Box 210856, Anchorage, Alaska, 99521-0856, U.S.A., Earth, etc.
john@zygot.ati.com (John Higdon) (10/16/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0447m04@vector.dallas.tx.us>, comcon!roy@uunet.uu.net (Roy M. Silvernail) writes: > Do you have measured service? What are the actual rates? Do you have > to juggle zones? Do you have a free-call area? If you were there for > the beginning of measured service, what was the introduction like? > (was there a public outcry? Was the public even consulted?) About 20 years ago, mandatory measured service was introduced to Pacific Telephone business customers. All new service orders went in as measured and existing customers were all converted over a year or two later. Back in those days, no one seemed very interested in the PUC hearings and this tarrif went through without any problem. People at PacTel fielded the calls from irate customers by responding that some customers would actually save money, since the monthly rate had been lowered (cut in half). But of course the vast majority of business customers started paying through the nose. Since that time, residence service has had the option of being measured. Unmeasured residence service is about $8.50/month while measured is about $4.50 with a $3.00 call allowance. A local call is $.05 for the first minute and $.01 each additional, with evening and night discounts. Pac*Bell has been trying to push the idea of universal measured service for years. They have offered various plans to the PUC (such as a service that includes 130 untimed calls/month and 15 cents for each call over--price: same as current unmeasured), but so far the PUC hasn't bought any of it. Now that Pac*Bell is unregulated for all intents and purposes, we may now probably count the days for unmeasured residence service. In my home I have a mix of measured and unmeasured lines (all in the same Commstar group). Any lines used exclusively for incoming calls are measured while out call lines are unmeasured. (Yes, they will mix measured and unmeasured lines in Commstar -- it is a common myth that they won't.) My prediction is that when they make all local calls measured, there will be some consumer groups that snort a bit but it will mostly happen without a wimper. John Higdon | P. O. Box 7648 | +1 408 723 1395 john@zygot.ati.com | San Jose, CA 95150 | M o o !
goldstein@delni.enet.dec.com (10/17/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0447m04@vector.dallas.tx.us>, comcon!roy@uunet.uu.net (Roy M. Silvernail) writes: > Do you have measured service? What are the actual rates? Do you have > to juggle zones? Do you have a free-call area? If you were there for > the beginning of measured service, what was the introduction like? > (was there a public outcry? Was the public even consulted?) Here in Mass., there are measured residence options but mostly it's flat-rate. Business is measured-only IF there are more than 160k local lines, otherwise you can get either. I.e., the boonies are flat, but Boston is measured. Measured local service, particularly for residence, is a truly awful idea. The usual justification is that it's "fair" that people who use more should pay more. But what is fair about monopoly rates that don't correspond to costs? Most local measured service plans don't have any relationship to costs whatsover. The classic study was done in Denver in the mid-1970s, where local calls can go up to 53 miles. The cost of the typical local call turned out to be under a mill a minute. Only the longest were around 2c/minute. It's no doubt part of the Colorado PUC's public record, but I don't have a reference. New York State is fairly rigorous about cost-based rates. New York City, with its extremely high percentage of tandem switching, is all measured. Costs vary with time of day, and there are multiple distance zones. Residence can be timed or untimed. Untimed is about 8c/call peak hour, timed about 7c plus a penny a minute after the first five. I don't have the details handy. But in any case, NYC is NOT typical of the rest of the country! I once worked at a firm whose major business was intervening in telco rate cases. Measured local service was a common telco ploy to raise rates. The cost of measurement typically exceeded the cost of the calls being measured! Thus it was actually padding the rate base, costing the ratepayers money, and not buying any actual benefit. If overpriced local calls cause people to talk less, then the actual cost/minute of the network will go up. That's terribly counterproductive and makes poor public policy. Typically 80% of telco local cost is fixed, 20% usage-sensitive. What usage sensitive pricing plan was like that? Usually it gets more than 50% of revenue from usage. Local calls, especially within a short distance (not the Atlanta/Denver multi-office extended local areas) are incredibly cheap, on a marginal usage cents per minute basis. If the telco could really justify the rate on the grounds of cost, it would be economically valid and "fair". But then it would be too cheap to bother with. Which means they really shouldn't bother, but they always come back again and again... fred
essachs@ihlpb.att.com (Edward S Sachs) (10/18/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0455m09@vector.dallas.tx.us>, goldstein@delni.enet. dec.com writes: > That's terribly > counterproductive and makes poor public policy. Typically 80% of > telco local cost is fixed, 20% usage-sensitive. What usage sensitive > pricing plan was like that? Usually it gets more than 50% of revenue > from usage. I think that this breakdown is not quite true, because the phone lines typically feed into concentrators at switching centers, which can provide service to only a fraction of the phones (typically 1/8 or 1/16 for residential lines) at a time. High usage lines need to be fed in at 1/2 (or even 1/1), resulting in higher equipment cost at the telco. Thus, the 'fixed' cost quoted above needs to include a component indicating the usage (% of time phone is in use). -- Ed Sachs AT&T Bell Laboratories, Naperville, IL att!ihlpb!essachs, e.s.sachs@att.com