The Dreaded Telco

Today is my railing against monopolies, specifically our local telco. We have 15 schools that use the telco to provide last mile and call exchanges.

At all of our schools we get a nice big bill in the mail that the local school leader approves and sends to the Central Office. The Central Office then cuts the check and sends it out. The whole process takes 2 weeks. However there is generally a 1 week lead time for the bill to arrive from the billing date, so if the bill cycle is the 25th we will generally get the bill on the 29th. When the check goes out, most of our schools are credited just within their bill cycle period and we generally dont have an issue with billing. However one of our school's payments only seems to post 2 weeks after the check is sent out.

The telco takes no responsibility for why this happens only for this school. The problem occurs when they cut phone service to the school which is a significant public safety risk. Service has been cut twice before we ever received notice that they show an overdue balance. After spending several hours discussing this dilemma with they they provided no solutions (we threw out there figuring out why it takes so long to post for this one school, giving a slighly longer grace period for this schools' payment to post, finding a way to get the bill sooner electronically etc.). So despite the fact that we pay them regularly they have no solution on how to prevent service termination. The kicker is that we always send the payment and they always are happy to cash the check.

To add insult to injury how they manage their last mile is significantly worse then their account management practices. As we only open schools in poor and underserved neighborhoods their last mile infrastructure (even in major cities) is atrocious. We have been asked to pay over $100k for them to pull service to a new school building because they have no capacity in the block. So for us to have the privilege of paying them a significant chunck of change monthly for internet and phone service we have to pay them that amount...and you know if they put in the capacity they will immediately try to sell services to everyone else in the neighborhood piggybacking our investment. Of course they are entitled to recoup money required to build out the infrastcuture but some of that should come from the sizable margin they are making on the service bills and the remainder should be a reasonable amount, without competition there is no need to make the charge reasonable.