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Technology Stocks : Voice-on-the-net (VON), VoIP, Internet (IP) Telephony -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stephen B. Temple who wrote (1490)	10/9/1998 8:29:00 AM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3178

Stepehen, re small business accounts and competition in the local markets: This is an actual story and it's a bit OT, but related to the previous message in several ways. >>But O'Neil stopped short of firmly committing MCI WorldCom to entering the residential, small-business and branch-office local markets if it wins the case.<< Indeed. Ever since WCOM took out MFS, the latter has been a bear to deal with where small businesses are concerned. Do you remember all those synergies that were to be realized? Well, they were realized alright... and to a great degree, IMO, they were realized at the expense of small businesses, as their backoffices were consolidated and the attention shifted to quality (read: lucrative) accounts at the expense of mom and pops. A large part of those realized savings comes from giving absolutely lousy service to former MFS customers with under several hundred lines. In 1994 we had a problem getting NYNEX at the time to take on our account in a timely fashion. We were coming off of a shared tenant service and on to our own PBX. NYNEX's response to our needs was deplorable... taking them a month to even acknowledge us. I made a few calls to MFS and they agreed to handle the situation on an expedite and did a soup to nuts provision within 15 days. Not pretty, but earnest and complete. This year we needed to relocate to an office directly across the street from where we were. On Aug.3 we placed an order with MFS. They never really fully acknowledged our needs until the last week of September, citing the one week work stoppage at BEL during August!! And the fact that their back office records were all fouled up for the same reason. Meanwhile, my simultaneous experiences for larger customers of theirs (clients of mine on Wall Street) dispelled any notions that back office problems were to blame, rather, it was obvious to me that the new WCOM was catering almost exlusively to very large customers, and putting the mom and pops on the burner. An interesting thing happened. We needed to relocate rather quickly, within several weeks, so we called BEL and they agreed to move us within three days as a part of their "Welcome Back" (or something like that) program, although they couldn't promise local number portability until a later date. So, we took a couple of temporary numbers, and had MFS call forward our directory numbers to them. BEL made this commitment to us on a Friday, and the new lines were installed on the following Monday Morning. At that point I could only recall thinking: "Isn't Competition Wonderful?" Following the new line installations from Telco we were later told that we were # 51 on the LNP schedule, which meant that we would be only the 51st customer of theirs to be ported under their new LNP platform... uh, ooooh... Within a day of our telling MFS of this development, they decided that they had somehow and miraculously suddenly found our service orders, and that they would have us up and running on our old numbers within a week... but they showed us having 31 lines, when in fact we never had anywhere near that number. Worse, they insisted that we did, and we're still trying to prove that the numbers they're showing never even showed up on our bills! At the current time we are using our lines from BEL, with the MFS lines forwarded to them, and awaiting the next surprise in this ongoing saga... Anyone want to know how it pans out, PM me. Now, we're really only talking about the simplest form of POTS here. Nothing to do with VoIP. But, can you begin to imagine what LNP issues will be like when the emerging Internet supported voice services become mainstream, and the number of service providers of all types has increased exponentially? Oy... I suppose that at that point I'll be musing again about the merits of competition from another slant. I suspect that if the service order adminstration folks at the new WCOM are reading SI, I can probably be in for a long wait... Regards, Frank Coluccio