July 28, 2001

UNKINKING TANGLED TELEPHONE CONNECTIONS

I never heard of a PIC freeze before last week, and now I have one on my phone. The last couple of weeks would have been less stressful if I'd known to do that a lot sooner. Perhaps this tangled tale will help you avoid my predicament.

My long-distance service was cut off by a company I never wanted to be a customer of, apparently for nonpayment of a bill I never received, and none of the five companies involved can fully explain what happened or why.

Why does one person need five telephone companies, anyway? I blame it all on Judge Harold Green, who dismembered Ma Bell in the 1980s.

The building I live in is new, and the company that provides telephone/cable/Internet service within the building is American Communications, which has devoted prodigious time and effort to trying to straighten out a mess that is not of its making.

Americom, as it calls itself informally, contracts with the local telephone carrier, Qwest, which became the dominant local provider by buying Baby Bell U.S. West.

And beyond that there was supposed to be AT&T for long distance. Instead, there was MCI WorldCom.

I found that out in June when Jeanie Draper of Americom called to ask whether I knew why there was a $602 call to Minnesota on my long-distance bill for April.

Unfortunately, I did know, or at least I suspected. Once when I was doing e-mail, the connection was interrupted and when I logged out the modem apparently didn't get the word. It stayed on the line for 2,600-plus minutes, until my son Peter, who runs the Internet service, noticed and disconnected it at his end.

Yes, I know I could get a local ISP. But I have two ISPs already, three if you count the one at work, and I normally use the home service so little that the long-distance charges are negligible.

Jeanie said she'd work with WorldCom to see whether she could get a credit on the bill.

Not WorldCom, I said, AT&T.

But WorldCom it was, and not by my request.

We deferred that matter for the time being, while she worked on the credit, and she postponed sending the bill (which came from yet another company that does billing for WorldCom) along to me until we knew how much it was supposed to be.

Then last week I tried calling my son in Minnesota and my phone told me it had been disconnected. For all I know, it could have been off for weeks; my e-mail had stopped working and I thought there was something wrong with the computer.

Mike Occhioniero, director of engineering at Americom, set up a call with Qwest to get the service reconnected and switched back to AT&T.

You couldn't call it efficient -- we talked with four different people, each of whom thought it was someone else's problem, and none of whom thought it necessary to tell me that it would take a week. But they seem to have managed it at last. And at Mike's recommendation, we asked Qwest to put a PIC freeze on my line so my long-distance provider cannot be changed without explicit verification from me.

PIC stands for ``presubscriber interexchange carrier,'' which you don't need to remember, and when you ask your local telephone company to put a PIC freeze on your line you are protected from ``slamming,'' a switch in your long-distance company that you haven't authorized. The freezes are maintained by third parties, not the telephone companies, and the cost is covered by the Universal Service Funding charge that is part of your phone bill.

Was I slammed? Nobody can say. The first story Ocechioniero got from Qwest was that AT&T requested my account be switched. Not very likely. Even Rebecca Saltman, the WorldCom media representative I enlisted to find out what happened to my account so I could tell readers, called that ``bunk.''

But WorldCom didn't request the change either, the company says. I didn't. Americom didn't; they use AT&T. The only thing Oechionero can find out is that it happened on the same day in January that Qwest made changes to my local service, at Americom's request. Whether it happened by accident or on purpose I'll never know.

At least it shouldn't happen again.

(716 words)