Sam,
Just a comment on my perception of a perception of yours. The issue around billing effectively for telephony is much more than saving a few trees and a few cents on postage by using e-mail to bill. CATV just has a few transactions per month, i.e., monthly charges per tier of service, any premium channels, and any PPVs selected. Add a cable modem, and you have one more monthly transaction.
For telephony, every call is a transaction. Imagine 200 calls per month per residential customer, not to mention business customers. Without local measured service, the customer may see most as zero cost, but if originated or terminated on another provider's network, there is an interconnect cost to be settled, say one cent per minute for local, close to a dime for some long distance. All of these transactions have to be tracked and credited or debited to the proper accounts. Customer service has to be able to query real time for any disputed charges. The data has to be captured and stored. Get the idea? Very complex and expensive. Failure to execute can cripple a business.
One of my better investments was Sprint a few years ago. We had tried their LD, but found errors in the bills and inability of their customer service to easily rectify the problems. So we switched to MCI. For a long time afterward, we received a credit every month for four cents, despite several calls to their customer service to just forget about it. I told myself that when the credits stopped coming, that would be an indication that they had fixed their billing problems. After a couple years, they did, I bought, and sold a year later at close to 100% profit. Why did the stock price appreciate? For some reason their margins widened! |
