Billing of Telecommunications Services

One of the biggest problems that many retail telecommunications customers have regards the billing of telecommunications services. This is especially true for small to medium businesses, schools, health organizations, local government offices, and others who purchase larger bandwidth services, sometimes for access to the Internet.  Such telecommunications services are almost always tariffed under the carrier's FCC tariffs. While these tariffs are frequently published on the carrier's website, few of these organizations have the expertise to read and understand such tariffs. If by chance they do acquire such expertise, even temporarily, it is impossible to get support from the FCC in resolving any problems regarding the services purchased. If there is a billing problem on an account for an FCC tariffed service, it is impossible to figure out what to do about it if the carrier just refuses to correct the problem.  The carriers' employees know this. These employees also are keenly aware that they do not get rewarded for fixing customers' billing problems. They get rewarded for selling more services. This is even, or especially, true for carrier customer support employees.  A former RBOC employee once told me that the primary mission of all carriers (and their employees) is to "create billable events". I laughed at the time. Now, I understand what he was trying to tell me.  The simple fact is that the FCC does not enforce carrier tariffs for higher bandwidth services with regard to retail customers. There is no link on the web site to speak with anyone at the FCC about enforcing a carrier's retail tariffs, nor is there a "retail compliance department" anywhere that deals with such issues. For retail customers who do not have a choice of carriers, and there are still a great many places outside the largest cities that do not have such a choice, it is a serious problem.  If these small businesses are resourceful, they will eventually seek out their local state legislative or congressional representative, who of course knows the carrier's lobbyist. If the representative puts enough pressure on the lobbyist, the organization may eventually receive a phone call from someone not in customer support at the carrier's office, who has the authority to fix the problem. Frequently, even though the problem gets fixed, only partial credits for previous erroneous billings and late payment charges are issued.  In the last five years, the number of services under FCC regulation sold by carriers has increased considerably, while the number of services under state regulation (such as POTS) has decreased, as carriers loudly lament. DSL is, of course, the biggest example of such a service, but many organizations also purchase PRIs, private line DS1s, frame relay services, ATM services, and other miscellaneous services which are tariffed from the carriers' retail FCC tariffs.

I would like to see a department of some sort at the FCC that is chartered to support retail consumers who purchase such services. This group would be available to assist retail consumers with problems in billing, problems in provisioning, problems with service, and other matters for FCC tariffed services.