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Free Conference Call Companies Rally Customers to Protect Services Minimize
Location: BlogsDavid Erickson's Blog    
Posted by: David Erickson 4/7/2010 7:21 PM

Free conference call companies are rallying customers to urge lawmakers and the FCC to not stifle their ability to continue using free conference call services. “We let people know to contact their representatives in Congress that they use the service and don’t want it to go away,” FreeConference.com Chief Financial Officer Mike Placido said in an interview.

The commission continues to get comments on a 2007 rulemaking notice concerning just and reasonable rates for terminating access charges by competitive local exchange carriers mainly located in rural areas. Bells have accused rural LECs of “traffic pumping,” and urged lawmakers and the FCC to look into ending the practice. The House Commerce Committee has collected information from CLECS and interexchange carriers to begin its inquiry (CD Feb 18 p 1).

 

FreeConference.com began last month sending a letter to customers urging them to take action. More than 100,000 letters were sent from customers to about 530 members of Congress, FreeConference.com said. Customers hope the committee “won't bow to pressure from large, national telephone service providers,” the letter said. More than 800 copies of a report paid for by FreeConferenceCall.com and conducted by Information Age Economics claiming that free conferencing services benefit underserved rural and tribal areas and that IXCs don’t lose money on calls made to such services, were delivered to Congress and the FCC, President David Erickson said. “We’ve developed a multi-pronged approach. We plan to involve our customers, and we’re making sure the decision makers in Washington have access to the facts.”

 

Connecting to a free conference isn’t hurting IXCs’ revenue, said Placido. As a customer, “I’m still paying for that call. I’m just not paying for the conference service,” he said. The IXC “would have you believe that somehow, by me making that call, they’re not getting compensated for that call, but they are.”

 

By paying exorbitant intercarrier compensation fees, it’s the customers of IXCs and wireless carriers who subsidize free conference calling services, Verizon said in an ex parte filing. Verizon said the claim that the “windfall profits” benefit rural areas is a "Robin Hood" defense that isn’t credible. "We're glad Congress is taking a look at this," a Verizon spokesman said.

 

Some rural carriers and free conferencing companies say IXCs, like Verizon and AT&T, commit “access theft” by disputing the fees and refusing to pay them. Erickson wants his company to be included in the efforts underway in Congress. “We’d be more than willing to help inform them,” he said. “Their request is somewhat limited in scope and we do have a lot to offer.” — Kamala Lane
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Re: Free Conference Call Companies Rally Customers to Protect Services    By Ekwunife on 4/14/2010 3:06 PM
I want to comment to the reg:free conference call companies rally customers to protect service.

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Lots of finger-pointing in Google Voice battle I wrote a story for today's paper about a free conference call company, FreeConferenceCall.com, that also uses rural numbers and, in exchange for driving call traffic, collects a fee from rural phone carriers. Free conference call lines like his make up a sizable portion of the calls that Google Voice still blocks. Read More...  
 

Pressure on Google over Blocked Calls

“Google shouldn’t be able to tell consumers where they can call and where they can’t,” said David Erickson, president of the Free Conferencing Corp. based in Long Beach, Calif., a company that set up conference calls for President Barack Obama when he was campaigning in 2008. Read More...

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Customer Comments Minimize
Dave - August, 3, 2010 - 12:10
Bill can you prove that 30 cent statement… with out it your whole rant falls apart. FreeConferenceCall.com average termination rate is below 1 cent...no LEC that FreeConferenceCall.com charges 30 cents a minute that is ridiculous...
Dave - August, 4, 2010 - 12:22
Allan-I am glad to see that you agree that everyone should be able to call anywhere within the country as long as they are willing to pay the charges for the call. Some guys think that we need to ask the big carriers for approval. Thanks for humoring me. First I would like to say that FreeConferenceCall.com saves consumers both time and money. FreeConferenceCall.com saves consumers time on the phone because they speak to multiple people simultaneously. As a consumer I like having the FreeConferenceCall.com service available to me. Secondly let’s not look at this from the big carriers’ point of view but the consumers’ point of view. You are a consumer, you pay for telephone service to be able to call anywhere within the country as long as you are willing to pay the charges for the call. Your thought that the users of FreeConferenceCall.com are stealing from the carriers is where I think you go wrong. Here is why, in order to make the allegation that FreeConferenceCall.com and its customers are stealing from the big carriers you would need to know: The average cost per minute the big carriers are charging the users of FreeConferenceCall.com? The average cost of terminating a call at the LECs that work with FreeConferenceCall.com? The average cost of terminating an ordinary call (non-FreeConferenceCall.com)? The average amount of time a FreeConferenceCall.com user is connected to the service each month? My guess is that you know none of these and that is why you use PT Barnum comparisons and hypothetical homeless people in a hypothetical apartment building and hypothetical government subsidies. With out the answer to the above questions what value are your comparisons. Prove me wrong! My response to your comments is that you don’t know what you are talking about. Prove me wrong! Your best answer so far to the average cost the consumer pays is that the big carriers are paying for termination as if they are not receiving money from the consumer to pay for connections. I guess in your eyes that once the consumer has given their money to ATT it is ATT money and should be spent for things like marketing more customers instead of benefiting the customer that gave them the money. Your best information offered so far to the average cost that a carriers get charged at a location where FreeConferenceCall.com’s services are provide is a that it is a “loophole” “subsidy” “rural exemption” “antiquated” “perverting” “welfare” “theft” “robbed” “shoplifting” “stealing”… But if the cost of terminating a call to FreeConferenceCall.com is in-line with the average cost of a non-FreeConferenceCall.com call isn’t the consumer just making another call.
VELMA S JONES, EVANGELIST - August, 2, 2010 - 03:41
THE CONFERENCE ROOM I FREQUENT WITH 18 OTHERS DAILY FROM 5AM - 7AM PST WOULD NOT BE IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM SUGGESTED BY MAGIC JACK...WHAT WOULD BE THE POINT OF MY ENTERING A CONFERENCE ROOM WHERE NONE OF THE FOLK I PRAY WITH WOULD BE? I DO NOT WANT TO USE A CONFERENCE ROOM WHERE THE ONLY PERSON PARTICIPATING WOULD BE ME AND ME ALONE. NONE OF THE PEOPLE I NOW CONFER WITH WOULD HAVE NOR WANT ACCESS TO A CONFERENCE ROOM OFFERED BY MAGIC JACK. THE NUMBER I USE TO ACCESS FREE.CONFERENCE.COM IS IN THER UNITED STATES, SOUTH DAKOTA.....MAGIC JACK SAYS I HAVE LONG DISTANCE SERVICE ANY WHERE IN THE UNITED STATES BUT DENIES ME ACCESS TO AREA CODE 605 IN SOUTH DAKOTA WHICH THE LAST TIME I CHECKED WAS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. THIS TO ME IS FALSE ADEVERTISING...I HAVE NOW RETURNED THE USELESS MAGIC JACK TO RADIO SHACK BUT WAS TOLD THE ONE YEAR SERVICE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE I WOULD HAVE TO GET FROM MAGIC JACK, WHICH OFFERS NO WASY TO CONTACT THEM EXCEPT FOR A WEB SITE THAT IS ALSO USELESS. I WILL BE FILING A CLAIM AGAINST TYHEM WITH MY LOCAL ATTORNEY GENERAL'S OFFICE.
Alan - July, 29, 2010 - 10:37
Although it seems you are avoiding speaking to the points I have made, I will humor you. Yes, you should be able to call anywhere within the country as long as your willing to pay the charges for the call. I assume you are asking this question because of the ill advised attempts to block your service by certain companies. On this point you are correct, they should not be allowed to stifle competition by acting in this manner. This said, you should not be able to force them to pay for your customers use of your service through mandates imposed on them from the FCC. Did the telcos setup the rural exemption? Do they have the freedom to tarrif their services anyway they choose? And if they actually did have the freedom to modify their pricing practices so they can include the additional itemized costs associated with each call would the consumer ever have a chance in heaven of figuring out their phone bill again. You and I both know that if the telecommunications industry was allowed to act as a free market instead of the controlled market that it is, there would not be any money left at the end of that rainbow (rural exemption) to make your model work. What you currently are doing is using the FCC to force the big telcos to subsidize your service for your customers. There is no free lunch, it just is sometimes hard to see who is paying the tab. As to your question as to why I think you are stealing. I think you are because you and your customers are. The price for phone service is regulated so the telephone companies are not free to set it. Since you have found a loophole you are exploting it to the financial misfortune of the LD providers. When through force (FCC regulations) you take the money from the phone company it sounds like theft. Legalized theft maybe, but theft none the less. In a retail situation, if a company loses money through shoplifting or inventory shrinkage, they first have the ability to improve their security and secondly can pass the loss on to the consumer. In this case the telephone companies do not easily have that same freedom. But they eventually will find a way to pass that cost on, and everyone will be paying for your service whether we want to or not. So now that I have answered your questions, please be so kind as to do me the favor of speaking to the points I have made in this and my previous post.
Dave - July, 29, 2010 - 07:59
Hello Alan I have 2 questions for you: 1. As consumers of telecommunications do I or do I not have the ability to call anywhere within the country as long as I am willing to pay the charges associated with calling that destination (even if that destination has a higher rate due to a rural exemption but I am willing to pay that too). 2. Why do you think I am stealing from big corporations when they set the price of service? Dave
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