telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (04/24/89)
For quite a few (like sixty) years, Illinois Bell offered several options
for unit billing. The choice was yours, depending on the community you lived
in and a few other factors. Units could be purchased in blocks of zero,
thirty, eighty, one-hundred forty and two hundred at a time. These had to
be used up during the month. You pre-subscribed for the number you thought
you would need, taking care not to oversubscribe and waste any. If you used
up your entire pre-paid package, additional units were billed to you, but
at a price slightly more expensive than pre-paid. The more units you bought
in advance, the cheaper they were. Units ranged in price from five and a
half cents (the person who bought zero to begin with) to as little as three
and nine-tenths cents each for the purchaser of two hundred who ran over
and had to pay for more.
Calls within your city or town were one unit, regardless of how long you
talked. Five minutes or five hours, it was still just a single unit. Calls
to other towns were billed on a time/mileage basis. Rates were typically
three or four units to start with, and another unit every minute or two.
You were free to use your prepaid units in any combination you desired between
local (in your town) calls and calls to other nearby northern Illinois
communities.
For heavy users, three additional plans were available: 'call pack unlimited'
permitted calling anywhere within a twenty-eight mile radius of downtown
Chicago without regard to units. Calls beyond twenty-eight miles from downtown
were billed as coin-rated calls. Obviously the cards were stacked in favor
of business places in the downtown area. People on the outer edges of
the ring, twenty-eight miles from downtown could call *into the city* as
often as desired; let them call as little as a mile outside of town to the
west/north/northwest/southest of them, and the coin rates kicked in.
A second plan called 'extended call pack unlimited' resembled the other
bulk plan, but allowed calling up to forty miles from downtown with no
regard to units. The third bulk plan was 'metro call pack unlimited' which
allowed unlimited calling throughout all of area 312, along with parts of
area 815 and a single prefix from area 414.
People in Chicago proper loved the call packs, obviously, especially if
their calls were mainly to suburbs where the time/milage factor was present.
But for suburbanites in the outer suburbs, the whole thing sucked, because
their choices were limited to local (within their town, all six blocks of
it) local calling - or - get the metro call pack unlimited in order to
call even a few miles away, if they were unfortunate enough to sit on the
outside of the 28 or 40 mile ring which circled downtown Chicago. Bell did
offer a service called 'Pick-A-Point' which allowed a special discount on
calls to pre-selected exchanges for a small monthly fee, but there were
problems with that also.
The people who wanted to get rid of the call packs and 'untimed local calls'
(although local calls *did* cost one unit each) were in organizations like
CUB -- the Citizen's Utility Board -- and similar consumer activist groups.
They wanted a pay-as-you-use-it system for everyone, based on calculations
which were obviously stacked in favor of the suburbanites. Don't forget,
Chicago is thirty miles from one side of town to the other, and we could
call a million phones over a twenty or twenty five mile area 'locally'
on an untimed call basis. The suburbanites could not do that.
Illinois Bell put a new plan into effect in March, 1987 which applied to
everyone in their service territory in northern Illinois. The plan eliminated
*all* unlimited call pack arrangements and prepaid unit packages. The new
plan gave untimed calls for one unit to everyone within approximatly an
eight mile radius of yourself. Each CO can call the CO's on any side of
it as a local, untimed call. The political and geographic boundaries between
the various towns no longer matter.
Calls outside the eight mile area are charged multiple units, based on time
and distance *and time of day*. Your local calling zone is always
Zone A. Zone B is 8-15 miles away; Zone C is 15-40 miles from you;
and Zone D is anything more than 40 miles away (from wherever you happen
to be).
In Zone A, a distinction is made between residence phones and business phones
as follows:
8 AM - 9 PM 9 PM - 8 AM
First minute: 1.0 0.7 Residence
0.7 0.4 Business
Additional Mins 0.3 0.2 Business
Additional Minutes do not apply on local Zone A calls from residence phones.
Zone B calls:
First Minute: 1.6 1.1 All phones
Additional Mins 0.6 0.4 All phones
Zone C calls:
First Minute: 2.1 1.4 All phones
Additional Mins 0.8 0.5 All phones
Zone D calls:
First Minute: 3.6 2.4 All phones
Additional Mins 1.3 0.9 All phones
Calls made during the nighttime hours are given a thirty-three percent
discount *in the number of units used* as can be seen from the above chart.
The cost of units goes down as you consume more. Of course by making most
of your calls during the overnight hours, it takes longer to use the
required number of units. At the end of your billing period, the number
of units you have used are tallied, and priced thus:
>From 1 - 50 units x .052 cents each = 2.60
>From 51-100 units x .050 cents each = 2.50
>From 101-200 units x .048 cents each = 4.80
>From 201-500 units x .045 cents each = 13.50
>From 501-1000 units x .043 cents each = 21.50
>From 1001-2000 units x .040 cents each = 40.00
In excess of 2001 units x .035 cents each
As an example, 500 units would cost $23.40, with a certain number purchased
at each of the intervening price steps shown above. 2000 units would cost
$84.90. To this, you add the 'network access fee', plus other charges for
non-pub service or additional listings, 'wire maintainence', if you choose
to have it, and of course, custom calling fees. Uncle Sugar gets his portion
as well.
When we city people could call 'locally' for one unit and talk all
day, I had a call-pack unlimited and was going through 2000+ units per month
with my modem. When the changes went into effect I quickly quit making modem
calls outside my local 8 mile area (zone A) with the exception of calls
to the Telenet switch which is in Chicago-Lakeshore, a *zone B* place. I
called via Telenet/PC Pursuit to (a) Portal Communications in San Jose,
CA; and to the (then) home-base for [TELECOM Digest] in Boston. Despite
the fact that I cut out virtually all modem calling outside my local area
except for the call to Telenet, I was still on line there for two to three
hours per day and still going through 2000+ units per month! The first few
months of my moderation of this digest brought me telephone bills of
$300 or more per month as a reward. Granted, that included my AT&T long
distance calls and the various charges associated with my Starline service,
but it was still eating me alive.
I dropped Portal in February this year, and began using Chinet for local
access to Usenet. Chinet, located in Chicago-Kildare is zone A. The digest
moved to Northwestern University, Evanston, IL which is now a local, zone
A call for me also. In the old days, Evanston would have been timed, with
the clock running on all my calls there. My March phone bill had slightly
over 700 units on it, a considerable drop from the months before. And
even though the units cost me slightly more since it takes me longer to
cross the threshold of 50/100/200/500 units consumed, the overall bill is
probably less since I rarely use the modem until after 9 PM at night, or
on weekends when the one third discount on *usage* (not price, mind you!)
also applies, as of a couple months ago.
When IBT dumped the old, unlimited call-pack plans, the loudest screams
came from the modem users and the work from home telephone solicitors,
needless to say. Where before unlimited call pack cost me about $80 per
month and I would stay on the modem for literally hours at a time to far-
away suburbs, the same calling practices now would run me hundreds of
dollars. But, the new plan is fairer to all concerned. After all, modem
users are still a small minority of the total customer base of the phone
company. The people who rejoiced in the new arrangement were those folks
who lived in the suburbs (about 50 percent of our metro population) who
*had* to take unlimited plans based around downtown Chicago or else pay
through the nostrils to call a mile or two from their home 'locally'.
People on fixed incomes who make little use of the phone for outgoing calls
also love the new arrangement. The old plan cost them on an average about
$12-15 per month; under the new plan they pay $8.50 for the line and
and the network access fee, but only pennies for the few outgoing
calls they might make each month.
Suffice to say, the modem users raised plenty of hell though! :)
Patrick Townson