Sprint Corp., owner of the fourth- largest U.S. wireless-phone service, said it will offer partial refunds to new corporate customers for poor call service.

New wireless contracts will promise refunds of as much as 30 percent to corporate customers if Sprint’s nationwide network has too many dropped or failed calls during a month, the Overland Park, Kansas-based company said in a statement. Customers must use a Web site to monitor Sprint’s performance.

Sprint is the first U.S. wireless carrier to give a service guarantee to all of its business customers, said Eugene Signorini, an analyst at Boston-based researcher Yankee Group. The move will help Sprint, which Consumer Reports magazine last year ranked near the bottom among U.S. carriers for service performance, improve the reputation of its network quality.

[ read more ]

By Christopher Stern, The Washington Post

«Shush, it’s long-distance!»

For decades, a long-distance call was something special -- and expensive. It could instantly quiet a dinner-table conversation and infuse a household with an aura of anxiety or romance.

Over time, long-distance became cheaper and more routine. And now it appears close to disappearing entirely as its own category, thanks to the popularity of unlimited telephone packages. For millions of people, it no longer makes a difference if they call across the country or across the street.

What began as a slow change has been accelerating in the past year or so, upending an industry long viewed as a steady utility. A combination of deregulation and new technologies has spawned a sometimes bewildering choice of pricing plans for consumers from different players -- traditional phone giants, wireless firms, cable systems and Internet companies. Most of them offer connections for much less than what separate local and long-distance used to cost.

[ read more ]

Lousy service is only one of many reasons Ma Bell is sinking fast. High prices and an upcoming merger might be just the prodding you need to bail out.

By Liz Pulliam Weston

All Jana Fleming did was move from one apartment to another within her Dallas complex earlier this year. That simple change of address led to a months-long battle with AT&T that endangered her credit rating -- not to mention her sanity.

AT&T erroneously charged a $216 disconnection fee for her high-speed DSL service, which she actually took with her to the new address. After numerous calls, hours on hold and six certified letters, AT&T issued a $342 credit -- to Fleming’s telephone account. Her DSL account was turned over to a collections agency.

„It’s almost comical,“ Fleming said. „It’s just been so absurd.“

Fleming believes her problem may be resolved; AT&T finally credited the right account and called off the collection agency.

[ read more ]

David Lazarus

SBC says a recent change for thousands of business customers will provide money-saving flexibility in determining the right long-distance calling plan.

So how come the company is making it so hard for people to understand this?

That’s what Elisabeth Jewel, a Berkeley political lobbyist, wondered after receiving a postcard SBC is mailing to business customers nationwide.

«I read legislation for a living and I couldn’t understand what SBC was talking about here,» Jewel told me. «I gave it to my partners to see if anyone could figure it out.

»We’re highly educated people, trained to read dense material," she said. «This was completely beyond all of us.»

[ read more ]

Frustration creeps into Richard Notebaert’s voice as he ticks off examples of regulations — both state and federal — that he calls outmoded and burdensome.

«This is just ludicrous,» said Qwest’s chief executive in a recent interview. «Ludicrous. If we want to put broadband in your neighborhood and we want to put (equipment) out here, we can’t do that until we give 30 or 60 days’ notice. We have to post it» on the Internet

Competitors, such as unregulated cable companies, could easily get the postings and target those areas for competitive services, he said.

Notebaert heads a cash-strapped telephone company scrapping for customers in a brutally competitive market. One key to Qwest’s revival, he said, is to relieve Qwest of almost all state oversight of its rates and customer service quality in Colorado.

[ read more ]