County to get $1.2M under pact
By Bill Novak

Profits won out over prisoners Thursday night when the Dane County Board approved a new jail phone contract that charges county inmates $6.25 for a 20-minute local phone call and didn’t go along with a plan to provide $25,000 in free calling cards to indigent inmates.

The board voted 22–14 in favor of a new three-year contract with Inmate Calling Solutions LLC of San Jose, Calif., that will pay the county at least $1.2 million a year, about $320,000 more than the current jail phone contract the county has with SBC.

But the board also voted 21–15 to turn down a plan from liberal supervisors, County Executive Kathleen Falk and the state Public Defender’s Office to give $25,000 worth of calling cards to indigent inmates in a move meant to appease loud protests from inmate advocates and families claiming they can’t afford the charges.

[ read more ]

IDT Telecom, a subsidiary of IDT Corp., said today it has signed an agreement to provide international long-distance service to Cablevision Systems Corp.’s Optimum Voice digital voice-over-cable customers. The service includes a remote calling feature allowing users to call from any location in the United States, Puerto Rico or U. S. Virgin Islands.

Cablevision’s Optimum Voice became available across the company’s New York metro-area footprint late last year. The company claimed 115,000 customers as of June 30.

[ read more ]

David Lazarus

State regulators gave SBC the go-ahead Thursday to raise the rate it charges rivals to access its local-calling system by about 20 percent.

While that won’t necessarily translate into higher per-minute fees for SBC customers, telecom-industry experts say Californians should expect an increase in the cost of add-on services like caller ID as competing phone companies drop out of the market.

«Choosing a telephone company soon will be like voting in a Soviet election,» said Bruce Fein, a Washington attorney and former Federal Communications Commission general counsel. «Choices will be narrowed, and people can expect higher phone bills and less service.»

[ read more ]

ATLANTA, /PRNewswire/ BellSouth (NYSE: BLS — News) With restoration and repair efforts well underway, BellSouth took additional steps today to help victims directly impacted by Hurricane Ivan, waiving charges for some services and for relocation costs.

«Many of our small business customers in Alabama have experienced significant damage to their business,» said David Scobey — president, BellSouth Small Business Services. «Small businesses are the heartbeat of the American economy. BellSouth wants to aid them every way we can. This disaster recovery plan will help our small business customers with damage that requires temporary locations or complete shutdowns stay running so that they can keep in touch with customers during this difficult time.»

The BellSouth Small Business Disaster Relief Effort includes the following for qualifying businesses’ service needs requested until October 8, 2004:

Service charges associated with providing dial tone phone service to a new or temporary location will be waived, as well as charges for a later move back to the original location.

[ read more ]

If you’d like to support the troops overseas, it’s likely your post office can help you.

The Northland District of the Postal Service is sponsoring a campaign called „Phone Cards for Troops“ that allows customers to purchase a phone card and donate it back to the postal service. The Northland District gathers all phone cards each week and donates them to commanders of area military units, asking them to distribute the phone cards to local troops deployed overseas.

Over 200 post offices in the Northland — which covers most of Minnesota and the western third of Wisconsin — are participating in the promotion. Customers may buy phone cards for $10 (100 minutes), $20 (250 minutes) or $30 (450 minutes).