PacBell Abdondon's Off-Peak Per Minute ISDN Charges

[James Love <love@Essential.ORG>]

-----------------------------------------------------------------
TAP-INFO - An Internet newsletter available from listproc@tap.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
INFORMATION POLICY NOTE - PacBell Abandons off-peak
April 9, 1996             per minute charges for residential
                          ISDN after pricing battle with
                          consumers

Yesterday PacBell announced that it was abandoning its 
efforts to increase its per minute charges for ISDN usage.  
PacBell will ask for an $8 per month increase in the fixed 
monthly fee.  As a result, California consumers will be able 
to buy residential ISDN service from PacBell for about $33 
per month, with a fee of 1.05 cents per minute, per B 
channel, during weekdays (from 8am to 5 pm), while off-peak 
usage (after 5 pm and all day on weekends) will continue to 
be unmetered.  

For 128 Kbps service, this is what the situation is in 
California.


				Table 1
         	(cents per minute for 2B service)

					Rate hike
					that was 
	  Current        Current        Abandoned
	  Residential    Business       for Bus/Res*
								
Day             2.10	   2.10          4.20
Evening          0         1.46          2.92
Night/Weekend    0          .84          1.68

(divide these numbers in half for the charge for using a 
single B channel).

*PacBell had offered at small allowance for residents [20 
hours of B usage (10 hours of 2B)] before the off-peak 
metered charges kicked in.

With new flat rate offerings by SBC, this leaves Bell 
Altantic and Nynex as the only Baby Bells which will 
continue to offer metered usage only tariffs for off-peak 
hours of network use.

This is an important victory for California's residential 
ISDN consumers, who would have been facing some of the 
highest ISDN charges in the US, if the rate hike had gone 
through.  The victory can be credited to the activism of 
many Calfornia ISDN users (such as David Barry:
http://www.pacificnet.net/~dcbarry/isdn/main.html)
and firms like Intel and Compaq, which opposed the PacBell 
rate hike.  While we believe the new tariffs are still too 
high, they are much much better than the ones that were 
filed last fall.

James Love (love@tap.org,202/387-8030)

Here is the PacBell press release.

------------------------

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
April 8, 1996

FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Mary Hancock
(415) 394-3620
mghanco@legsf.pacbell.com

Statement: Pacific Bell FASTRAK ISDN Pricing Modification

The following statement is attributable to Tom Bayless, Director, Switched
Digital Services for Pacific Bell.

A media conference call to answer questions regarding the amendment has been
scheduled for Tuesday, April 9 at 10:00 a.m., PDT. To access the conference,
please dial 1-800-259-6654 and ask to be connected to the Tom Bayless
conference call.

As a result of the California Public Utilities Commissions' March 13 order
and related pricing rules that provide guidelines on how Pacific Bell will
resell its products and services, we have modified our December filing on
ISDN pricing. Under the amendment, we will raise the monthly fee for ISDN by
$8, rather than increasing the per-minute usage charge.

The CPUC's order moved ISDN into a competitive product category. In this
category, the rules for how the product should be priced require that each
component of ISDN (i.e., usage, monthly fee and installation) be priced
separately, and that each component be priced to enable us to recover our
costs. As a result, the various components can no longer subsidize each
other. Under this scenario, our December request proposing an increase in
usage to help us cover our cost of providing the service is no longer
viable.

Our amended proposal will enable us to provide the service at a monthly rate
that is still among the lowest in the nation, and with usage charges that
are among the most reasonable in the U.S. It also reflects concerns we've
heard that raising the per-minute charges would have a significant impact on
our heavy ISDN users


+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
INFORMATION POLICY NOTES is a free Internet newsletter sponsored
by the Taxpayer Assets Project (TAP) and the Consumer Project on
Technology (CPT).  Both groups are projects of the Center for
Study of Responsive Law, which is run by Ralph Nader.  The
LISTPROC services are provide by Essential Information.  Archives
of TAP-INFO are available from

http://www.essential.org/listproc/tap-info/

TAP and CPT both have Internet Web pages.

http://www.tap.org
http://www.essential.org/cpt

Subscription requests to tap-info to listproc@tap.org with
the message:  subscribe tap-info your name

TAP and CPT can both be reached off the net at P.O. Box 19367,
Washington, DC  20036, Voice:  202/387-8030; Fax: 202/234-5176
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++