Re: SWBT Oklahoma ISDN tariff application

["Fred R. Goldstein" <fgoldstein@bbn.com>]

  At 10:45 AM 6/14/96 -0400, James Love wrote:
  >On Fri, 14 Jun 1996, Fred R. Goldstein wrote:
  >> I'm not aware of US West asking for callpak pricing.  The USW boilerplate
  >> is more reasonable, if overpriced; its mainstream offering has a 200 hour
  >> threshold.  
  >
  >   In Utah, US West asked the Commission, during the hearing a few weeks 
  >ago, to consider a new set of tariffs.  They dropped the flat rate from 
  >183+ down to 149, as I recall, keep the $68 tariff for 200 hours, and 
  >introduced a $50 tariffs with a 40 hour calling allowance.  Both the $50 
  >and the $68 tariffs provide pre-paid calling for different blocks of 
  >usage, 40 hours in the one case, and 200 in the other.  I thought that 
  >pre-paid usage was a "callpak" package.  Am I using the wrong term?  
  
  That's the first time I've heard about that particular variant.  That
  would indeed be a callpak! 
  
  It's a particularly noxious one, of course.  The 40 hour number is right in
  the *middle* of the typical usage pattern, and the US West overtime is set
  at a really high (punitive) level.  
  
  >In 
  >any event, the difference between the $50 and the $68 tariffs are $18 and 
  >160 hours == $.1125 per hour, for the last 160 hours.  All this one a 
  >single B.  2B service counts double, so the $50 would buy 20 hours of 2B 
  >or the $68 would buy 100 hours of 2B.  Scott and Lorraine, do i remember 
  >these new tariffs correctly?
  
  The key to a threshold tariff is that the nominal price per hour (.1125)
  is usually irrelevant because few users come close.  The key to a callpak
  is that most users do.  I think they want $39 for a fully-measured line.
  So by subtraction, $11 gets you 40 B channel hours, which comes to .46 cents
  per minute.  The typical user will use more than half of the time, so the
  net cost/minute will be under a cent.  But boy if you go over you're hit!
  
  Again this gets into the whole problem with measured tariffs.  Resi users
  DO NOT WANT TO WORRY ABOUT THIS.  They do not want to worry about whether
  this net session will put them into a penalty box, or whether they're
  paying for an overly-expensive callpak.  They want predictability.  That's
  what flat and threshold rates are about.
  
  When ISDN is measured (even under guise of callpak) and POTS is flat rate,
  guess which one people prefer to buy?
  ___
  Fred R. Goldstein      fgoldstein@bbn.com  
  BBN Corp.              Cambridge MA  USA    +1 617 873 3850