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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JF Quinnelly who wrote (14808)	11/2/2003 5:45:32 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793688

We have been posting about the Cell Phone mess for quite a while. A lot of QCOM stockholders, (or ex) here. _______________________________________________ Can You Hear Me Now? Both AT&T and MCI are providing phone services to the U.S. military in Iraq. But miscommunication over their different roles has made it harder—and more expensive—for soldiers to call home By Martha Brant NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE Oct. 31 — Like so many other military family members, Heather Dunkel has come to think of the phone line as her lifeline. Every time the phone rings, or the call waiting clicks, her heart skips. Is it Stephen? HER HUSBAND, an Army reservist, is stationed at the Baghdad International Airport. Until recently, he was able to call home once or twice a week. “You can imagine how beneficial these calls were to me,” she explains. “They also helped our 2-year-old daughter to know that her daddy still exists.” But about two weeks ago, the frequent calls came to an abrupt halt. The Department of Defense ordered MCI, the provider for cheap cell-phone calls home, to cut off those phones for soldiers. They were intruding, it seems, on AT&T’s territory as well as clogging up official lines. Suddenly, soldiers not only had to go to calling centers, but they were paying a lot more to call home. AT&T got inundated with complaints. “A lot of family members I know have cancelled their service with AT&T over this,” Dunkel says. At first, this sounds like a case of greedy Corporate America gouging servicemen and women. As one officer’s wife put it in a widely disseminated e-mail to military family members: ”[AT&T’s] stiffing our soldiers and our families.” But it turns out to be a classic case of miscommunication. The folks bringing us Iraqi reconstruction, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), gave MCI the job of building a wireless network. Some 12,000 cell phones were supposed to be available for government and humanitarian agencies to talk to each other and their home bases. But some of the phones were also given to unit commanders, especially those in remote areas. Realizing that phone calls home are a big morale booster, smart commanders let their soldiers use the phones, usually with a prepaid calling card Those calls using MCI were heavily subsidized by the government. Calls from Iraq were first relayed back to a calling center in the United States so the soldier paid U.S. domestic rates to talk to loved ones. The charges ranged anywhere from 2 to 15 cents a minutes to call stateside from Fallujah or Tikrit. But CPA had a problem, explains the Pentagon’s Lt. Col. Ken McClellan: “Their bandwidth was being monopolized by family conversations.” AT&T was not happy about the situation either. The company has won what’s called the “health, morale, welfare” contract to provide phone service for troops. Unlike MCI, it has to pay out of pocket for the calling centers and satellite phone system the company is setting up. “We have taken the financial and operations risk,” says AT&T spokesman Bob Nersesian. One mobile calling center disappeared (it showed up vandalized a few months later) and one burnt down. Meanwhile, by offering subsidized rates on lines that weren’t intended for soldiers in the first place, MCI was cutting into AT&T’s business. So the Department of Defense told MCI to cut it out. “At this time, the DoD has ordered us not to provide personal cell phones and to block all 800 calls,” says MCI spokeswoman Natasha Haubold. Now, soldiers have to use either AT&T’s 600 satellite phones (more expensive at about 76 cents a minute) or one of a mere nine calling centers. There are 48 lines in each center. Not much for 130,000 troops. AT&T is building five more centers by year’s end. But compared to easy cell-phone access, the centers are certainly more of a hassle. And they cost more: until recently, the rate was 35.5 cents a minute to call home. That was a pretty good deal, but still at least twice as much as the MCI rate. The complaints the DoD and Congress have been getting about this, explains McClellan, are “basically a matter of sticker shock.” Only partly. For a company that’s all about communication, AT&T has done a terrible job of explaining all this to troops and their families. So has the DoD. Many parents are still buying AT&T cards here in the U.S. and sending them to their sons and daughters to use in Iraq. “They think 60 minutes is 60 minutes anywhere … but international rates are much higher than domestic rates,” says Nersesian, adding that the company is taking out ads in military-base publications to try to better explain the new system. Families often find that a card they bought stateside and thought would last for 500 minutes can end up providing only 100 minutes of actual talking time because of huge connection fees. No wonder people are so upset. Freedom may have come to Iraq, but a free market has a way to go. AT&T has the monopoly on service for troops for now. But the government, not AT&T, sets the price of the prepaid cards. The cheapest ones are the “550 global units” cards available mainly at post and base exchanges in Iraq (as well as in Kuwait and Afghanistan). The Army and Air Force Exchange Service—the quasi-private group that runs PXs and BXs and sets the prices for calling cards—recently decided to lower the price of prepaid AT&T cards to 31.8 cents a minute. Finally, someone is hearing military families loud and clear. msnbc.com