| 3.3-1 Business Basics/MCI |
I’ve always been interested in business but since I was a kid I was especially intrigued
with telephones and the telephone company. In my day, the only phone company
around was AT&T. That was not because all of the other companies were bad and
couldn’t compete well - it’s just the simple fact that they didn’t exist. Well, not that
they wouldn’t have liked to but the government didn’t allow them to exist. The
government in a very old decision made long before 1991 gave a legal monopoly to
AT&T to carry all phone service in the United States of America consolidating a
patchwork of small family owned phone companies into one huge monstrosity. But
that was now quickly changing. The Federal Communications Commission had
decided a few years before to try an experiment to allow some other companies to
supply long distance phone service in competition with AT&T. A startup company
called Microwave Communications Inc. later to become known as MCI decided to take
advantage of this experiment and started supplying long distance service to willing
customers. This did not sit well with the powers that be at AT&T who still believed
they were entitled to their monopoly.
AT&T did not want to give up its business easily and so set up many road blocks to
prevent this unwanted competition from succeeding. In order to get around one of
the road blocks MCI had to offer its long distance service via a calling card. For
those of you who have never had the opportunity to make a call using a calling card
let me describe the process for you. Even though using a calling card was painful, as
I will describe below, the savings over what you’d pay to AT&T for the privilege of
calling long distance made it worth it. Especially on calls away from home, the
charges from AT&T could be several dollars per minute so a ten minute call could
easily cost you $50 dollars. However, at some point the calling card process just
becomes inane. I think this point occurs when you need to make more than one long
distance call in the same day. To give you an idea of how frustrating calling using a
calling card can be I’ll need to explain the calling card dialing process in detail.
First of all, the calling card process can be broken into the following three steps:
1. Dial the MCI computer system
2. Dial the desired party’s phone number
3. Dial your personal calling card number.
In order to complete a phone call all three must be completed in perfect sequence or
your call would not be completed. The following is my description of the three dialing
processes.
The first step in the dialing process connects you to the MCI computerized long
distance phone system. MCI had a dedicated local system access number (950-
1022) for this and this part of the call was considered a local call by AT&T and so
AT&T didn’t get any cut of the call. You might think of this connection as being like
what you need to do today to connect to the internet using a dial up service provider
(ok, that is in the past too now but wasn't when I wrote this long ago). However, in
some locations the 950-1022 local number didn’t exist. So to allow connection from
these locations MCI was nice enough to have a toll-free system access number (1-
800-950-1022). Once you connected to the MCI long distance system you then had
to wait about eight seconds for a new dial tone which allowed you to move on to the
next step in the dialing process. So after dialing up to 11 digits and waiting as long 8
seconds you are finally ready to dial the number of the party you wanted to call in the
first place.
To start this next step you first had to dial a zero then the area code and the phone
number of the party you were trying to reach and then wait for a second dial tone
which indicates you entered a valid phone number. That’s another eleven digits,
which brings the total digits dialed so far to twenty-two. And you aren’t done yet.
There is still the third step and thank God the final step. Oh, and please note that
starting the callers number with a 0 was contrary to the ‘normal’ way of dialing a long
distance number which was to use the prefix 1 before the area code - so this was
another error prone step.
The purpose of the third step was to inform the MCI system of your personal calling
card number. This is how the system verifies you are a valid customer so they can
charge your account for the call. The calling card number was a ten-digit number just
like a phone number although it was not necessarily your home phone number but
could be. In my case I didn’t have a home phone so it was just a random ten-digit
number assigned by MCI. Following these ten digits is another four digits which is a
security number (PIN) like the numbers you use at an automated bank teller
machine. So after dialing these fourteen numbers you would hear two special
confirmation tones which indicates your calling card number is valid and the call can
now go through.
Finally!
After dialing a series of up to 36 digits you now get to talk to someone - if they
answer. And after all of that I really, really hoped they answered. But remember, the
main reason you are using this system is because you are saving lots of money over
using AT&T - a very good thing and a choice you never had up until now.
As an early user of this system I had a lot say about it - and it wasn’t good. So I
vented. I got a hold of the MCI customer service and let them know my issues. Since
my suggestions were beyond the comprehension of the customer service
representatives, they actually and unbelievably put me in touch directly with the
engineers that created the calling card system. I gave them several ideas that they
added to the system. One of these was the ability to make a second call without
having to hang up. This saved a caller from having to reconnect to the system and
having to re-enter his or her personal calling card number. Another ideas was the
ability to back up one digit if you made a mistake. They never implemented that one
exactly but instead allowed you to start the second step over by pressing the # sign
once you realized you mis-dialed (um, yes, cell phones now allow you to erase a
number but they don’t actually send the whole phone number until you have
completely entered it. The old telephone system always sent each digit in the phone
number immediately so that the old electro-mechanical switches in the system could
start making the necessary connections otherwise the call would have taken longer to
connect to your desired party).
Unfortunately, these fixes didn’t take care of all of the annoyances. One such
annoyance was that the system would kick you off for being too slow. This occurred
during the second or third step of the dialing process. If you hesitated dialing the
phone number of the party you were trying to call or your didn’t enter your personal
access number quick enough, then the system would time you out with a busy signal
and you would have to start all over again. Even the second call option wouldn’t work
in this case. Since most people don’t memorize the phone numbers they wish to dial,
they obviously would need to keep looking back at a written form of the number. This
takes time and very often it took longer than the time allowed, especially when the
number you are looking for is written in an address book and you lose your place
because you have to look at the phone pad to dial a few numbers, find the number in
the book again and dial some more numbers.
Anybody crazy yet?
To summarize, if you are a good dialer and you know this system well, it is an easy 36
digits to complete one operator free call. If you are only slightly prone to error, then
you might have to dial between 47 and 57 digits. If you are more prone to error, then
you may be dialing between 57 and an infinite number of digits. I guess you might as
well not call.
But, alas, MCI had a solution for those of us who were prone to dialing errors - “the
operator assisted call”. Just dial the access number and wait the eight seconds for
the dial tone and then about seven seconds later an operator will come on the line
automatically to assist you in dialing your desired party if you hadn’t dialed any
numbers.
Now, having been with MCI a long time and having used my calling card hundreds of
times, I knew this dialing process well. And being an engineer, I have no difficulty in
using the system under normal circumstances because it appears to be a system an
engineer would design: easy when there are no problems but enigmatic and complex
when errors occur.
Anyway, since most persons probably aren’t engineers, they would probably choose
to dial the MCI access number and wait for an operator to come on the line, giving the
operator the remaining 24 digits and letting him or her complete the call for them.
But, this too has its problems. Many times the operator does not hear all of the digits
correctly and you must repeat them. This can quickly become frustrating as well,
especially when you are trying to make a series of calls.
Such is the MCI calling card dialing process. Just so you know, AT&T and Sprint's
dialing process, as far as I know, operated roughly the same way. It is just that MCI
was first to come up with this process to get around AT&T’s high charges. MCI’s
method is actually what caused the break-up of the government sanctioned AT&T
monopoly. Now let’s get dialing. We have a lot of people to talk to tomorrow.
Remember, we’re setting up a new business and we need lots of help from
connections to succeed.
World Turned Upside Down
Music -Telephone
Line by ELO
Line by ELO