OTHER COMPETITIVE TELECOM SERVICES

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 brought true competition in all areas of telecommunications services that had not previously seen competition. The intent of the act was to provide more competition in dial tone or Competitive Local Exchange Carrier services [CLEC], along with long distance services. The thought was that the local telephone companies would work closer with their competitors so that their competitors could provide local exchange services and, therefore, enable the local telephone companies to start providing long distance services. This has worked, to a limited degree.

JRA has had repeated success since 1996 in working with the client base in competitively seeking alternatives to some of the basic telecommunications services. The following are examples:

DIAL TONE: Dial tone services may now be purchased by end users from other than the local telephone company. Initially, companies were reluctant to leave the local provider, as they assumed that the new companies would not provide a service level that was acceptable. Price (savings) considerations, coupled with success stories from other users of the services, prompted many end users to venture forth for competitive proposals. In certain cities, usually major metropolitan areas, that have competing CLEC companies that have their own switching systems and networks, the cost for competing dial tone services is substantially less than similar services provided by the incumbent telephone company. Even in the more rural areas where the CLEC companies do not have their own switching systems, discounts of 15% over the going rate are usually pretty standard. The firm has one client in a major metropolitan area that is saving $400,000.00 per year by converting their dial tone services to a CLEC company. This particular end user is a major subscriber to ISDN/PRI services and, as you may know, Ameritech and some of the other companies have very substantial user costs for outgoing local toll calls. The term "local toll" is still difficult to say or understand.

LONG DISTANCE SERVICES: Surprisingly, many large end users feel that $.06 or $.07 per minute for outgoing or incoming long distance service is a very competitive rate. This is not true in today's competitive environment. We are still very actively providing a service to clients whereby we prepare a system specification for long distance services and submit it to at least three of the large national companies, as well as one or two of the resellers. Under this competitive process, we are often able to get per minute costs for our clients in the $.04 per minute range. These prices can depend upon the amount of traffic, the amount of customer commitment and how the services are accessed. Regardless, we are almost always able to reduce our clients' costs associated with long distance services.

CELLULAR SERVICE: There was a recent commercial where a gentleman locked himself in his study every weekend, telling his family that he was trying to decide which cellular company they should subscribe to. He was then shown watching football, etc.

Our foray into this sometimes-strange arena suggests that this guy may have better spent his time actually reading the companies' brochures and talking to their salespeople. This service is one of the more confusing services that we have addressed in our consulting practice. Quite often, the responses that we receive from even the national providers do not address some of the more basic questions of our system specification. However, in one case, a very large user was spending over $8,000.00 per month and, we were able to subscribe to services that reduced their monthly costs to about $2,000.00 per month. Strange as it seems, the new company was able to provide services that offered more features, a larger coverage area, and included all roaming and long distance charges. [By including, we mean that these charges were not added to the bill].