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Teletruth News Alert: February 15th, 2007

Click to see Cartoon: Bad Math at the FCC: Why Is this Guy Smiling?
http://www.newnetworks.com/fccsbadmath.htm

The FCC is about to testify in front of the House Commerce Committee with one of the questions being: "What steps, if any, can the Commission take to enhance the depth and accuracy of its collection of data and analysis of affected industries?"

It's clear the FCC's data needs serious help. FCC Chairman Martin's Recent testimony to the Senate (February 2007) outlined how the cost of long distance service has seriously dropped (see http://www.fcc.gov)

"In 2005, the price for long distance service was two-thirds of what it was in 2000."

Teletruth's new free report "AT&T and MCI (Verizon) are Harvesting Customers", outlines in detail how AT&T and MCI-Verizon have been continuously raising rates, especially since the mergers of AT&T-SBC and MCI-Verizon. For low volume users, especially seniors, rates have increased over 200% since 2000.

To see the report: http://www.newnetworks.com/attmciharvesting.htm

While the FCC claims that prices have gone from $.09 to $.06 a minute, AT&T's phone bills show that prices have increased for basic rates, from $.19 to $.42 a minute, not counting increases and additional fees, from minimum usage charges, monthly fees, cost recovery fees, single bill fees, and all taxed and surcharged. Customers are paying $.50-$1.00 a minute when these charges are added up.

In fact, AT&T and MCI are currently "harvesting" customers: "Harvesting refers to AT&T's increasing price increases to encourage customers to discontinue service." We estimate that 30-40 million customers, mostly low volume users and especially seniors have been seriously harmed.

As we document in the report, the FCC's data is so bad that it missed the fact that 1/3 of the US households have been hit with massive increases.

We are calling on Congress to investigate the harvesting of customers and the failure of the FCC to notice the harms to customers.

Why should you care about 'bad data' at the FCC? It cost you money. The FCC is using this same bad phone bill data in a plan called "Missoula Intercarrier Compensation" to raise the FCC Line Charge on your local bill from $6.50 to $10.00, increase Universal Service and increase added fees.
Bad Data equals bad news for customers.

See: http://www.teletruth.org/FCCMissoulaletter.htm

More about Teletruth: http://www.teletruth.org

Bruce Kushnick, Teletruth
bruce@teletruth.org
Tom Allibone, Teletruth
tom@teletruth.org