🚀 go-pugleaf

chi@netcom.com (Curt Hagenlocher) writes:

>My girlfriend used to go to UCI and I live on the Westside.  It cost me
>more to call her than it did to call my parents in Sonoma County.  Why?
>With no competition on the call to Irvine (category "Zone 5"), PacBell
>had no impetus to lower the rates.

>It has been longstanding practice for the phone companies to subsidize
>local calls at the expense of long-distance, and residential calls at
>the cost of business.  As the local telephone companies lost control of
>the longer-distance cals, the basic residential rate went up.

The competition was always there.  There was and is plenty of no-surcharge
calling cards with 800 access and plain old 950-xxxx, and even a card with
a 50c surcharge would have saved you on a call longer than 5 minutes or so.
The fact that most people don't bother to look further than their phone book
and have no imagination works well for Pacific Bell.

The "new lower rates" are a myth for a residential customer because they
will be noticeably lower only during business hours, and practically the
same (and still higher than long-distance rates for the same mileage) at
evening/night time.

Returning to people who don't know or don't care how to dial 10xxx, under the
new rate structure, Pacific Bell still gets away with charging more than LD
companies (and remember, they pay Pacific Bell to complete the LD calls
locally, and Pacific Bell does not have that overhead, which constitutes
a major part of the LD rates when they get below 10c/min).  Of course, if
you own Pacific Telesys stock, it's probably good for you and you'll get
a few extra bucks next year, but I don't see how paying an extra $30/year
for nothing can benefit me.

>--
>Curt Hagenlocher
>chi@netcom.com