by David Lazarus
Alamo resident Bryan McCaul received a postcard from Sprint the other day warning that the long-distance provider is about reach deeper into his pocket.
"Currently your Sprint long-distance charges are included in the monthly bill you receive from your local phone company," the card said. "Effective Aug. 1, 2005, there will be a $1.50 Single Bill Fee for this service."
It explained that "this monthly fee is necessary to offset increased billing costs that Sprint pays to the local phone company to include your long-distance charges on your local bill."
McCaul can avoid the $1.50 charge if he opts to receive his bills online. Sprint will also waive the fee for any month in which his long-distance charges top $40.
"I don't mind this so much," McCaul told me. "It'll spur me to do online billing. But I wonder about all the people who didn't bother to read the postcard," he said. "I'll bet a lot of people are never going to notice this extra $1.50 charge."
Telecom companies routinely come up with creative ways to rake in more money from customers. I reported last week that MCI is introducing a
99-cent monthly fee just for receiving your bill in the mail.In fact, Sprint has been charging a single-bill fee since early 2001, as have AT&T and MCI (which each charge substantially more).
Caroline Semerdjian, a Sprint spokeswoman, told me that the company only recently noticed that it had inadvertently neglected to impose the fee on a number of customers nationwide, so that's why the postcards are going out now.
She declined to say how many of Sprint's millions of long-distance customers managed to duck the fee for so long. (For that matter, she also declined to say exactly how many millions of long-distance customers Sprint has.)
This is the cost that we have to pay SBC to provide this service," Semerdjian said.
Christine Mailloux, a telecom attorney at The Utility Reform Network in San Francisco, found this a laughable claim.
"There is no way Sprint is paying SBC $1.50 a month per customer," she said. "They're just passing off a profit-making charge as a cost of doing business to make still more profit."
For its part, AT&T charges $2.49 a month to combine its long-distance costs with your local bill. Gordon Diamond, an AT&T spokesman, said the fee "covers our costs to process and provide the billing data to the local exchange carrier."
MCI, meanwhile, dings long-distance customers with a whopping $3.99 monthly single-bill charge. Debbie Lewis, a company spokeswoman, said this "covers the costs we incur to deliver this service."
It's important to remember that single-bill fees are completely discretionary on the part of phone companies. There's no government regulation that says they have to be charged.
Marc Bien, an SBC spokesman, said the Bay Area's dominant local-service provider cuts individual single-billing deals with each long-distance company.
He declined to say whether the fees charged by the various carriers reflect SBC's cost -- as the long-distance firms would have us believe -- or whether the carriers are significantly marking up the charge.
But Bien acknowledged that SBC is already purchasing paper, printing bills and mailing them out as part of its own customer service. As such, he said that including additional long-distance charges represents "an incremental cost."
He also observed that the long-distance firms must each have billing systems that are technologically compatible with SBC's so the data can be automatically transferred.
"I don't know why each one charges a different rate" for single billing, Bien said. "Perhaps they have different business models."
No, they all seem to have the same one.
"They just use this as a way to generate revenue," said TURN's Mailloux.
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Call waiting: Speaking of Sprint, here's a little fun you can have. Try calling its customer service department at (800) 877-4646.
I've tried it more than a dozen times over three days, and nearly every time I get the same recording:
"Due to the overwhelming positive response to our products and services, to speak with a Sprint representative, your wait will be approximately 10 minutes."
In other words, you can't get through to a service rep because would-be customers are beating down the door in response to Sprint's products and services.
You believe that, don't you?
Copyright 2005 San Francisco Chronicle
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