The Sinister Moose

Did we learn nothing from the break-up of Bell Telephone? Forcing the monopolizing Bell telephone company to break into smaller, more regionalized telephone service providers was a good idea for competition, but today we seem to be allowing that company to reform and again start it's monopolistic business practices.

My recent experience with Bell South (the largest telecommunications provider in my area) has made me start wishing for another monopoly busting campaign.

Several years ago, Bell South bought Cingular but left the Cingular name. They did this as a way to prevent people from discovering that it was actually all owned by Bell South and avoid an anti-trust suit. However, a couple of years ago, AT&T bought all of the Cingular wireless carriers, and changed the name to AT&T, but they weren't done; they also bought a significant portion of "baby Bells" like Bell South, leaving just enough regional carriers to avoid further anti-trust issues. They also fought to eliminate all of their competition by eliminating the requirement to allow anyone to start a telephone service provider using their wires.

As late as 2005, if I was interested and had the money for equipment, I could start a telephone company and use AT&T's telephone lines which AT&T was required to lease to me. Now, they are not required to lease any space to anyone, because of the proliferation of cell phones, and because of billions of dollars spent on lobbyists.

Back to my original problem.

For 6 years my business had a T-1 Dedicated Internet Connection, for $620.00 per month through Bell South. It was a very reliable set-up and rarely failed.

Two years ago, AT&T bought Bell South, and informed us that we were required to switch to the AT&T Managed Internet Services T-1. This switch would involve changing routers, and so forth. I informed them at that time that I didn't care what they called it, as long as I had complete control over our equipment with 5 static IP addresses available on the end of a Cat-5 ethernet cable. I was assured at that time that this would be the case.

I was sent a Cisco 1841 Router which had a US Robotics 56K modem attached to the top of it via velcro (which seemed cheap and tacky at the time). After receiving the router, we were never visited by an AT&T technician, and no changes were made to our existing T-1 equipment. Our existing T-1 continued to function exactly as it had, and we continued to receive and pay the bill for it. However, we started receiving and paying a bill for the new AT&T MIS T-1 as well. The new MIS T-1 from AT&T was only $483 per month, which seemed reasonable, until we realized that we were paying for two T-1 connections when we only had and were only using one.

To add to the confusion, no one at AT&T could confirm that the new T-1 would be configured to be unmanaged, after my repeated warnings that I owned, managed and controlled all of our telecommunications equipment, and I did not want their "services", only a T-1 connected to the internet. I went through 6 months of wrangling and arguing with multiple different people at AT&T, until I finally lost my temper and told them to come take all of it out, phone lines, T-1, and even my cell phones. I no longer wanted to deal with AT&T on any level, or for any reason.

I switched all 25 business cell phones to Verizon, and then switched all of my local phone lines to a CLEC out of Texas called Birch Communications, and I found a local ISP who could provide me with dedicated internet via a point-to-point wireless system.

3 months ago, AT&T finally turned off my old T-1, and turned my accounts over to collections. I suppose that's one way of getting everything lined out correctly, but it's a huge pain in the ass.

I seriously need the dedicated T-1, but unfortunately the only way to get it is through AT&T. I caved in and called AT&T and was sold a Managed T-1 and even though I was very clear, and precise in my request that I wanted a 1.5meg unmanaged T-1, I ended up with a 768k managed fractional T-1 with Voice over IP.

Our inhouse phone systems will not handle VoIP as Kenny Caveman built our phones out of twigs and bark. AT&T is also not interested in giving me the equipment to translate VoIP to copper analog phones, so I still haven't gotten what I want.

This afternoon, I received a call from someone at AT&T asking if I was pleased with the level of service I received.

You can imagine how that conversation went. After venting my frustration, I impolitely told the Hindu operator on the other end of the call to stick the entire company in their ass, and go straight to hell.

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