Ordering a Phone Line

The world of telecom has two types of service, switched and dedicated. Switched service is what you probably have at your house. If you don’t have a phone system, but just have a jack in the wall and a phone number that is assigned to it, you have switched service. These are the regular phone lines (sometimes called POTS, or plain old telephone service) you use every day. Switched service is so commonplace that when you think about phone lines, you think about POTS.

Ordering a switched phone line seems like a simple task. All you need to do is pick up the phone and call your carrier to order one, right? Well, not exactly. Not every carrier can give you a phone number.

Need a line? Calling a LEC

You can only order a phone line from a local exchange carrier (LEC) like Qwest, Bell South, or Verizon; competing local exchange carrier (CLEC) such as Mpower; or a cellphone company. These companies have been authorized by the U.S. government to distribute phone numbers. You can’t order a phone line from your long-distance carrier because the long-distance divisions of MCI, AT&T and Sprint are only authorized to complete calls sent to them. The U.S. government has not given them the authority to deal in the collection or distribution of phone numbers for their customers.

Calling your local carrier

If you have any phone service at all, you receive an invoice from your local carrier every month for it. Having local services makes life easy when you want to order more phone lines because you just have to call the customer service number listed on your invoice and order them.

If you have just paid your local phone bill and don’t have one handy, don’t worry, there is still a way to find their phone number. If you have a regular local carrier, like Qwest, Bell South, or Verizon, you can simply dial 611 to reach customer service. Usually, this number is used for reporting trouble on your line, but many local carriers have adapted it for general use. If you call 611 and don’t reach an automated attendant system, asking you to “please select from the following menu options” but instead reach a live human, the rep who answers the phone will be more than happy to transfer you to customer service.

 Remember  If you do not have a standard local carrier like Bell South or Verizon, but instead have a CLEC, you may hear any variety of recordings or responses. In this case, you have about five minutes more research before you can call them. Go to the next section and walk through the steps to find and contact your local carrier.

Getting local versions of long-distance companies

 Tip  MCI, AT&T, and Sprint do have divisions that provide local service that can give you a phone line. You would call MCI local, AT&T local, or the local division of Sprint in Las Vegas, Nevada. This being said, unless your business has been targeted by one of these companies, or you live in Las Vegas, these companies probably can’t provide you with anything other than long-distance service.

Finding out who your local carrier is

If you don’t have a phone bill handy, and, for some reason, dialing 611 doesn’t work, you can always dial the operator by pressing 0. Listen carefully, because the operator will probably identify the name of your local carrier. The only problem with this technique is that some local carriers contract out operator services, so instead of reaching a local operator in your city, you may be transferred to someone in the Philippines who works for a company that provides operator service to many local carriers. It’s possible that your operator has no idea what the name of your local carrier is.

Don’t worry. If all else fails, there is a foolproof way to get a phone number for your local carrier; it’s called the Internet. This is a simple process after you connect to the Internet:

1. Visit www.localcallingguide.com.

2. Scroll down to the middle of the page and click the Search Area Code/Prefix/OCN link.

   The Area Code/Prefix Search page appears.

3. Type your company’s area code in the box marked NPA. Type the first three digits of your company’s phone number in to the box marked NXX.

4. Click the Submit button.

   The Search page refreshes and lists your company’s city, state, and local phone carrier.

When you know the name of your local carrier, you can find a phone number for it by starting a search from www.google.com or www.yahoo.com. When you visit your local carrier’s home page, you won’t have to look too hard to find a Contact Us section and a phone number for customer service.

 Tip  If you move to another town, or across the country, you probably won’t know who the local carrier is for your new house or business. No problem. All you need is a phone number for any home or business within a five-mile radius of your new location. Plug the area code and prefix into the www.local callingguide.com site and you can find out their local carrier. Because local carriers generally don’t change within the same town, you have all the information you need to order your new phone lines.

Placing the order

When you call your local carrier to place an order for new service, you have to navigatge through the maze of prompts. Eventually, you reach a nice person whose job it is to take your order. If you have existing phone service, this is generally a painless procedure. You’re asked to confirm your identity, your address, and the billing name on your invoice. When the preliminaries are over, you’re asked how many new phone lines you need, and then to validate the address, the features, configuration (is the new number going to be in a hunt group with your other lines or not?), long-distance carrier, and area of coverage for your long-distance carrier. If you’re adding to existing service, you should tell the agent to duplicate what you have on your existing lines.

Securing your phone lines with a PIC freeze

A PIC (primary interexchange carrier) freeze is a logistical security device. If you tell your local carrier to place a PIC freeze on your phone lines, the carrier locks your long-distance carrier on your lines and never changes it — until you personally call your local carrier, identify yourself, and have the freeze removed.

Depending on the procedures your local carrier has set up for activating and removing PIC freezes, you many be able to simply call your local carrier, or you may have to fax the carrier an authorization. After the PIC freeze is removed, your new long-distance carrier can send the local carrier another order to convert your lines. I am sure you’re wondering why you would want to go through all this effort whenever you want to change long-distance carriers. Glad you asked.

The benefit of a PIC freeze is that it protects your lines from having the long-distance carrier changed on it without your knowledge. In the industry, slamming occurs when a customer gets a new long-distance carrier that was never requested. PIC freezes are generally available for free from your local carrier, and automatically reject any attempt to change the long-distance carrier assigned to the protected phone lines. Carriers don’t offer account-level PIC freezes, so your local carrier has to place a freeze on each individual phone line you have to ensure that they are all protected.

 Remember  You may have to place PIC freezes on both intraLATA and interLATA lines, because carriers usually handle them seperately. If you place a freeze on only interLATA long-distance lines, you could have a long-distance carrier slam your intraLATA calls. Getting the freeze is fast, free, and easy, so place a freeze on all of your lines, and both the intraLATA and the interLATA options.

Understanding and recovering from being slammed

When your phone line is slammed, it is not always done intentionally. Quite often, it is the result of a typo on the part of someone at the carrier or one of the carrier’s customers. Many companies have so many phone lines that they don’t have a solid accounting of them. They may have 20 numbers in sequence and think their last number ends at -2328. In reality, the group of numbers may end at -2327. If the long distance carrier sends an order to your local carrier for the complete range of numbers, including the extra number (-2328), the actual owner of the phone number receives an order for a new long-distance carrier.

A similar typo could be made by an eyesore data entry employee in the provisioning department at a carrier where the number -2341 was entered rather than -2431. The advent of antislamming laws in the U.S. has created a large dis-incentive for unscrupulous long-distance companies who used these tactics to bring on new customers in the past. Now that sufficient legislation is in place, the percentage of people intentionally slammed is very small, with the vast majority being the unintended result of human error somewhere in the system.

Understanding your long-distance options

 Tip  Your local carrier identifies two areas of coverage available for your long-distance carrier: intraLATA and interLATA. IntraLATA calls, also known as local toll calls or Zone 3 calls, cover any phone number you dial that is over (roughly) 13 miles away but still located within your local access transport area (LATA). InterLATA calls cover any calls you make to phone numbers outside your LATA. It is usually a better option to have your long-distance carrier pick up both areas of traffic, because your local carrier generally charges for the intraLATA calls based on mileage. In other words, if you call to a phone number 100 miles away, but the number is still within your LATA, your local carrier may charge you more than it would if you called someone 20 miles away. As a general rule, long-distance carriers charge you a flat per-minute rate, regardless of where you call in your LATA. If you don’t make these calls often, how you’re charged may not be much of an issue. Check your last phone bill to see what your average rate per minute is for these calls, and then decide which carrier is better. If all this talk about LATAs is making your head spin because you don’t know what one is, please jump over to Chapter 3 for a crash course.

You probably won’t simply wake up one day with an epiphany from the universe telling you that your long-distance carrier has changed. Most people figure it out by either receiving an invoice from a new long-distance carrier or discovering that all of their long-distance calls are suddenly blocked. As soon as you realize something is drastically wrong, call your local carrier. When you have a customer service agent on the phone, you should do the following:

1. Find out the name and contact number for the carrier that slammed you.

   This information is necessary so that you can call the offending carrier and research what happened.

2. Switch your long-distance back to your old carrier.

   Your local carrier is the only company that can do this, but it doesn’t keep a record of previous long-distance carriers on phone lines. If you had a mainstream carrier like Sprint or MCI, tell your local carrier to switch your phone lines back and you won’t have any more problems. If you used a reseller or lesser-known carrier, you may need to call your old long-distance carrier to send in another order to switch your lines back.

3. After your phone lines are switched back, place a PIC freeze on all your lines.

   Just because it has already happened once doesn’t mean it can’t happen again. You don’t need the hassle — again.

4. Dispute all charges for calls that went across slammed lines with your local carrier.

   In short order, the second you start the dispute process, you will probably be chatting with a representative of the carrier that slammed you. This conversation will either occur because the carrier is responding to your dispute of the charges, or because you directly tracked the carrier down to discuss the matter. Unless the new long-distance carrier can confirm (by confirm I mean prove) that you, or some authorized person at your organization, requested that your phone lines be changed, the slammer should credit your charges for long-distance service.

    Remember  The cost of paying for slamming fees for violating FCC regulations is more than a few dollars, so it is in the best interest of the offending carrier to credit any charges and make the problem go away. If you have 1,000 minutes of usage to Dussledorf, Germany, or some other overseas location, you may hear some resistance when you ask for a credit. The truth of the matter is that you did make the calls, and they did complete them. A strong argument could be made that they should receive something for the service they provided. In this case, the very minimum you should negotiate from them is to receive a credit to adjust the rate they charged to what you would have paid on your old carrier.

5. Request a credit for the change charges.

   Your local carrier is going to charge you a few dollars every time it changes your long-distance carrier. If the fee is $4.50 for every carrier change, you may be hit with an $18.00 charge per line. That’s because you have to pay four times; once to switch for your intraLATA calls to the new carrier ($4.50), once to switch your interLATA calls to the new carrier (another $4.50), two more times for moving them both back (another $9.00). If you have ten lines or more that were slammed, you should demand a credit for the change charges.

Planning for inside wiring

Your local carrier is only responsible for bringing your phone lines to the minimum point of entry or MPOE (pronounced em-poh). If the main phone closet is at one end of your building and the new phone lines for your fax machines need to be run to the other end of it, someone needs to connect the phone lines from the MPOE to the room where your fax machines are sitting. The section of wiring that runs from the MPOE to your phone system or telephone is called your inside wiring. Your local carrier has a set policy that stipulates whether it provides inside wiring, and how much installing inside wiring costs. The local carrier may be more than happy to provide the inside wiring, or it may have a blanket policy to only drop phone lines at the MPOE.

 Tip  If you are a thrifty shopper, you should call your hardware vendor to install the inside wiring and not use your local carrier. Your hardware vendor is probably cheaper and more flexible, and it may be willing to do the work when the timing is most convenient for you and your business (something a local carrier cares very little about). If you do not have a hardware vendor, look in your phone book under Telephone Equipment & Systems–Installation– Repairing & Service. You can do an online search with these terms, along with your city, to find a vendor. For example, if you’re looking for a vendor in the Los Angeles area, open your Web browser and browse your way to the Google home page. Type telephone equipment systems installation repair service los angles and click the Google Search button. Any business listed in the results should be able to give you a quote for running wire from the MPOE to anywhere in your office.

 Tip  If you aren’t a thrifty shopper, but like security, it is better to pay a little more and let your local carrier run the inside wiring if that option is available. If the local carrier installs the inside wiring, it probably also offers inside wiring insurance. For a nominal fee per month, this insurance can save you money if a technician has to be dispatched to your office on a trouble issue. If you’re generally resistant to having your local carrier dispatch a technician to your site because the fee the local carrier charges is about the same hourly rate as a Ferrari mechanic, remember that having inside wiring insurance means you shouldn’t care — the site visit is free.

Adding a new phone line to your long-distance carrier

At some time during the call to add your new phone line, you find out your new phone number(s). Write down the number and then immediately give it to your long-distance carrier. Although it seems logical that your local carrier will tell your long-distance carrier about your new phone line, that is not always what happens.

 Remember  Despite the fact that all carriers make their money by facilitating communication, you should never assume that your local carrier and long-distance carrier have great communication with each other. Many scenarios could prevent your long-distance carrier from knowing about a new phone line. If the number assigned to your company isn’t in sequence with your other lines, the long-distance carrier may not notice the addition. Or perhaps the new line is for a new office down the road from your main office. If the new office receives its own bill, the person doing data entry for your local carrier may not make the connection. Or maybe Mercury is in retrograde and the information just isn’t flowing like it should. Blame astrological events. Blame the ironic forces that make it possible for these companies to have vast communications networks and still function in silos. Whoever or whatever you blame, just make the call to your long-distance carier and tie up the loose ends.

Dealing with a screw-up between the local and long-distance carriers

If your long-distance carrier doesn’t receive the information to add phone lines to your account, you will suffer one of the following fates. Both fates are equally painful, but easily fixed (they both — shock — involve calling your long-distance carrier):

Fate number 1 — outrageous billing: If a long-distance carrier receives calls from a phone number it doesn’t recognize, the carrier charges the highest rate possible. You read that right. The dime-a-minute rate it took you two months to negotiate isn’t applied to that new phone line. Instead, your local carrier can bill you at the highest rate on record for the long-distance carrier you selected.

Symptoms: When you receive your invoice, you see that you are paying 75 cents per minute with a $2.50 connect fee.

Solution: Call your long-distance carrier and have it place that phone line on your account. The problem is that the long-distance carrier may not be able to make the rate retroactive and credit you for the difference on the calls that have already been billed. You may be able to negotiate for a credit, and if the contested amount of the bill is $5 or less, the carrier may be agreeable. If you are asking for a rerate credit of $600 and you bill out an average of $10 per month, you can expect some resistance. You may be able to get some relief by escalating the issue to the supervisor at your long-distance carrier, but be prepared for the long-distance carrier to stick to its guns.

Fate number 2 — fraud block: Long-distance cariers have either an open network or a closed network. If the network is open, anyone can complete calls on the network, even if the caller doesn’t have a service contract with the carrier. Without a contract, individuals are billed at the highest rate possible, but the network will complete any call it receives. A closed network is the opposite; it does not accept calls from just anyone.

Symptoms: The only way you can complete a call on a closed network is if your phone number has been placed into the long-distance company’s system prior to making your first call. If you attempt to place a call on a closed network, your call is rejected and your phone number is logged into the system as a number that is restricted. Because the closed network doesn’t have a billing reference or account set up for you, the carrier is concerned that you are going to run up a phone bill of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then disappear. These preemptive blocks, called fraud blocks, prevent this problem. Open networks also have triggers for fraud blocks. You may be able to dial phone numbers in the U.S. for months, never setting up a formal account, without having any problems completing calls. Whenyou make two calls to any international destination, however, your second call is blocked, and suddenly you won’t even be able to make domestic calls.

Solution: To remove a fraud block, call your long-distance carrier and make sure that it has an account for the phone number that’s experiencing the problem. After the account is updated to include the new number, tell the service agent to remove the fraud block.