And they wonder why small businesses are such advocates of net neutrality…here’s a great example of the "big boys" cutting out the "little guy".

AT&T/Cingular, Sprint and Qwest have begun blocking customer calls to free conference services like FreeConference.com. My understanding is that it only applies to wireless calls. But still!!

Thinking this must be a hoax, I did a little digging, and found the following info at a GigaOM blog post:

Turns out most wireless service agreements allow them to block any
calls they believe are causing them  "excessive billing, collection,
fraud problems or other misuse of our network" (from a Cingular forum). An AT&T spokesman went as far as to say that their service is designed for one-to-one calls, not one-to-many (buggy whip, anyone?) — although Cingular (which is AT&T Wireless now) offers a paid conferencing option to their customers!

The reasons behind this are complicated. From GigaOM:

"Typically, long-distance or cellular providers pay local telcos a
termination fee for each call that is completed. In rural areas where
regional telcos have higher-than-usual termination fees, telcos and
free-calling concerns have partnered to build businesses where some
amount of profit is based on the spread between what the
call-completion costs and what they charge the long-distance provider."

Seems like a creative business model to me — although there are claims that this takes advantage of a loophole in FCC regulations, and violates the spirit of those regulations. Oh, I forgot — only big companies are allowed to take advantage of legal loopholes!

[Caveat: this may or may not apply to you; some customers of these
wireless carriers report no problem connecting. It may be phone-number
dependent, as conference services change numbers to stay ahead of the
blocks.]

If you’d like to complain to the FCC, Michael Port gives the link and pre-written text for your use. Thanks Michael for the heads-up on this one!

Last 5 posts by Terri Zwierzynski

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Virtual Teams, Solo Entrepreneur News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.