Frustrated by the nickels and dimes long-distance companies have been loading onto their monthly bills, a growing number of phone customers are designating “no carrier” as their choice for long distance.
This does put an end to monthly charges for billing, universal service and so on, but it can pose an economic trap of its own, as Nancy Meline of Westchester recently discovered.
Customers without a designated carrier should make their long-distance calls by dialing 10-10 plus five digits to connect with an alternative carrier, or they should use prepaid calling cards, which require dialing 10 digits to reach the carrier.
If someone without a designated carrier picks up the phone and dials 1 plus the number, as happened in the Meline household, the call can sometimes go through just fine, and a huge bill will follow.
In Meline’s case, a single call generated a bill from Sprint Corp. for $18.
After calling Sprint, she learned that if your home phone doesn’t have a designated long-distance carrier and you dial a call in the usual fashion, it essentially is fair game for any long-distance carrier lurking on the network to grab the call and charge very high rates.
“I thought I wouldn’t be allowed to make a long-distance call without some message or something that told me what I’d be charged,” said Meline.
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An Ameritech spokesman said that is how it is supposed to work. A recording should have said the call couldn’t be placed as dialed.
Meline was told by Sprint that when a long-distance carrier grabs an unaffiliated customer, they charge the “casual rate,” which she says “really means charge at the highest rate because this person has no recourse.”
Maybe they should call it the “casualty rate.”
Wireless overnight: A pioneer at using wireless technology to improve productivity, Federal Express, has made a deal with AT&T Wireless to use that carrier’s advanced mobile data service for the next generation of applications FedEx is planning.
The folks at AT&T Wireless are so tickled over this deal that they’ve arranged to bring a FedEx executive to Chicago on Wednesday to talk about it.
“The significance is that FedEx has decided to move from a private wireless network to a public one,” said Roderick Nelson, AT&T’s chief technology officer, who will also speak Wednesday at the Hyatt Regency Chicago.
AT&T has been among the first to launch its advanced wireless data network. Verizon Wireless also has one in operation and Cingular Wireless and Sprint PCS are planning launches this summer. Nelson said that AT&T welcomes the others into the fray as it works to build customer acceptance for its products.
“Given the structure of the market–with six national companies–it’s very difficult for one carrier to create a movement all on their own,” Nelson said. “The ideal is to be best in a field where everyone is pushing it forward.
“It will take some time for the population of users at large to recognize, looking at their handset, there’s more to that than talking.”
Besides transmitting data faster than its earlier generation of wireless data, AT&T’s new system also features handsets with color screens, which Nelson said has proven to be a major advantage.
“It makes using the system more fun,” he said. There are also some applications, such as a radar weather map showing where rain is falling, that just wouldn’t work without color, he said.
IT churn: Despite the massive layoffs of information technology workers following the dot-com collapse, IT people with jobs continue to leave them at a high rate.
This was among the findings of a report compiled by META Group Inc., an IT research and consulting firm, after it surveyed 600 medium-to-large American corporations.
“Surprisingly, given the difficult economic climate, voluntary departure rates at technology companies continue to be high, with an average turnover for all reporting companies at 10 percent,” said Maria Schafer, who wrote the study.
“That’s down by only a single percentage point from 2001.”
The turnover is high enough to concern executives, the study found. The number of firms offering retention bonuses to keep key IT staff grew to 44 percent last year, up from 12 percent in the previous year.
Another unexpected trend spotted in the META study was that about one-third of the firms surveyed said that despite the economic downturn last year, they expanded their IT staff.
On the horizon, managers said they fear the next few years will bring a rash of retirements by Baby Boomers that may be hard to fill. Many of the older IT workers run legacy systems that younger people don’t know much about.
Fighting chips: A chemist on the University of Chicago faculty, Milan Mrksich, has developed biochips that search for molecules that may be useful in fighting or diagnosing disease.
His technologies have been licensed for commercial development by Surface Logix of Brighton, Mass.
The pioneering work also won Mrksich recognition by Technology Review magazine as one of the nation’s top young innovators.