< PREVIOUS ] [ 1988 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
If you're a residential customer in Denver, you can reach more than a million telephones with a local call, and talk for as long as you please. Your base rate is $10.74 a month. In Salida, I can reach about 2,000 phones with a local call, and I pay $7.82 a month.
Obviously, a telephone is a much better deal in Denver. The toll-free area extends from Boulder to Castle Rock. That range is much smaller in rural areas, which works a hardship on rural businesses.
Consider Grand County, where I once published the weekly newspaper in Kremmling. The courthouse, though, is in Hot Sulphur Springs. Granby is the commercial center. In the summer, Grand Lake bustles, just as Winter Park does during the nine months of winter.
Each town has its own telephone exchange, and it's a long-distance call between them. Granby to Hot Sulphur Springs is but a dozen miles, but it's a toll call. Same for Grand Lake to Granby, or Kremmling to Parshall.
In a rural area, you have to deal a lot with other towns, because your little town isn't self-contained. If you live in Parshall, your kids go to school in Kremmling -- and it's long-distance just to call their school. If you own a Chevrolet in Granby, you'll deal with the nearest Chevy garage, which is in Kremmling -- a long-distance call.
To conduct ordinary business, or just to keep in touch with people nearby, you run up a tremendous telephone bill. People doing the same things in a metropolitan area don't.
It is precisely this inequity that Mountain Bell is attempting to address in its latest rate filing.
Mountain Bell proposes to establish larger toll-free areas in rural parts of the state. That will cost the phone company some long-distance revenue. To make up for that, Mountain Bell wants to change its billing procedures in metro areas. You'd still be able to get unlimited flat-rate calls across the metro area, but you'd pay a higher base rate. Or you could pay a lower base rate, but then pay by the minute when you called out of your immediate area.
As a rural resident, I naturally like the idea. Rural Colorado is facing some tough economic times during this transition from an industrial economy to an information economy. If it becomes easier and cheaper to transmit information out here, the rural economy might improve.
But I doubt Mountain Bell's proposal will fare well before the Public Utilities Commission when the hearings start this fall.
The consumer advocates will denounce the plan, as they should -- after all, most consumers live in cities, and they're more concerned with their own pocketbooks than with whether people in the boondocks are getting a fair deal.
For another, the trend on the federal level is to give rural telephone customers the shaft. A year ago, the FCC wanted specialized long-distance companies -- ones that provide access to computer information services -- to pay the same local access fees that other long-distance companies pay. The lack of the access fee is why a weekend hour on Telenet costs only $2 while AT&T charges $10.
AT&T serves everybody, everywhere. The computer-link companies, who weren't paying their share of the cost of the telephone system, serve only the cities. Rural customers could not benefit from this unfair system, whereby every telephone customer in America subsidizes a few thousand metropolitan computer users.
But the FCC has backed down. In modern America, fairness
and equity don't matter. Squeaky wheels get greased, and
cities have a lot more wheels to squeak. Now that Mountain
Bell wants to try being fair to its rural customers, the
consumer advocate
wheels have started to make an
awful lot of noise. That will be the end of it.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1988 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >