woolsey@nsc.nsc.com (Jeff Woolsey) (03/15/89)
I just got off the phone with a nice (but relatively uninformed) lady from MCI who called to interrupt my dinner and tell me that their Around Town service eliminates the charges for local calls, such as those between my phone in Mountain View, CA, and somewhere like San Mateo or Berkeley, for which Pacific Bell charges long distance rates. I was under the impression that IECs were prohibited from carrying intra-LATA traffic; has this changed???? Asking her this produced a puzzled repetition of her earlier spiel. (Come to think of it, until I set her straight, my girlfriend used to call me on her MCI card only because we live in different area codes. The call is still local, and free for flat-rate customers.) Further wonders of modern telephony: I was on the phone with this salescritter long enough for another salescritter from, alas, the local cable TV outfit to interrupt our pleasant repartee and try sell me a premium channel or six for a four month trial. And I pay $x.xx per month for this convenience! Alas, also, it only occurred to me two minutes after I hung up to assert that I already had MCI as my primary carrier (i.e. lie) and use the miracles of 3-way calling and company code dialing to produce MCI's recorded message thanking me for selecting them. Nevertheless it was interesting to see what happens when the informed meet the enlisted. -- Qualify nearly everything. Jeff Woolsey woolsey@nsc.NSC.COM -or- woolsey@umn-cs.cs.umn.EDU
e118-ak@euler.berkeley.edu (e118 student) (03/18/89)
The MCI person was a bit confused. As a happy user of MCI's "Around Town" feature, I can fill you in on what they mean about eliminating charges for calls from San Mateo. If you use your AT&T or Sprint calling card, you are billed a surcharge ($1.05 or $0.55, or who-knows-what if it's intrastate). However, if you use your MCI card from any phone within a nebulously-described "local" area around your home phone #, it goes through at the same rate as if you dialed it from home -- no 55c surcharge. The "local" area is actually rather generous: I live in Berkeley and made a call from San Rafael, which is just across the line from ZUM-3 to Toll, (about 20 miles in real terms) but it still went through as "Around Town." --Linc Madison = e118-ak@euler.berkeley.edu I have no connection to MCI except that I carry their calling card. (In fact, my home service is on Sprint....)