AT&T Violated Rule Requiring Low Prices For Schools, FCC Says (arstechnica.com) 58
Jon Brodkin, reporting for Ars Technica: AT&T overcharged two Florida school districts for phone service and should have to pay about $170,000 to the U.S. government to settle the allegations, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday. AT&T disputes the charges and will contest the decision. The FCC issued a Notice of Apparently Liability (NAL) to AT&T, an initial step toward enforcing the proposed punishment. The alleged overcharges relate to the FCC's E-Rate program, which funds telecommunications for schools and libraries and is paid for by Americans through surcharges on phone bills. The FCC said AT&T should have to repay $63,760 it improperly received from the FCC in subsidies for phone service provided to Orange and Dixie Counties and pay an additional fine of $106,425. AT&T prices charged to the districts were almost 400 percent higher than they should have been, according to the FCC. AT&T violated the FCC's "lowest corresponding price rule" designed to ensure that schools and libraries "get the best rates available by prohibiting E-Rate service providers from charging them more than the lowest price paid by other similarly situated customers for similar telecommunications services," the FCC said. Instead of charging the lowest available price, "AT&T charged the school districts prices for telephone service that were magnitudes higher than many other customers in Florida," the FCC said. Between 2012 and 2015, the school districts paid "some of the highest prices in the state... for basic telephone services."
Where will the money go? (Score:3)
Why doesn't the $170K go directly to the school district? I doubt the FCC has anything to do with ensuring the school districts budgets are compensated.
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If I read the summary correctly the Schools will get about 106k for the over charging and the FCC will get the rest since they failed to qualify for the subsidy.
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From the summary
"AT&T overcharged two Florida school districts for phone service"
"AT&T prices charged to the districts were almost 400 percent higher than they should have been"
"AT&T violated the FCC's "lowest corresponding price rule" designed to ensure that schools and libraries "get the best rates available by prohibiting E-Rate service providers..."
"AT&T charged the school districts prices for telephone service that were magnitudes higher than many other customers in Florida,"
So, where i
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Why doesn't the $170K go directly to the school district? I doubt the FCC has anything to do with ensuring the school districts budgets are compensated.
TL;DR: AT&T stole from the FCC, not the school.
The school district agreed to the terms and signed the contract.
The money goes back to the FCC because AT&T gets money FROM the FCC to make up for the discount.
It isn't that AT&T is forced to discount, they're just supposed to bill the FCC for the difference between the discount and full price.
Since AT&T didn't discount to the right amount, they owe the FCC back that money.
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TL;DR your wrong, please go read the summary again.
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"you're"
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From TFS:
The FCC said AT&T should have to repay $63,760 it improperly received from the FCC in subsidies for phone service provided to Orange and Dixie Counties and pay an additional fine of $106,425.
So, clearly the $63,760, that it received from the FCC, is the FCC's money. They're getting it back.
The $106,425 is a fine for breaking the law. The FCC gets that money for dealing with this pain in the ass.
If someone drives too fast down my street and gets a ticket, I don't get a cut of that ticket, even though the driver wronged me by being dangerous on the street my kids play near.
Working at school right now, so I'll AC this... (Score:1)
But here's how E-Rate works, and what AT&T did...
E-Rate money never goes to schools, and was never setup to go to schools, in order to avoid fraud. (Ex: I bid out a project, quote it for a million, get the check, then order something cheaper and pocket the difference.) It goes to vendors, and vendors either charge districts the difference (no school gets 100%, but compensation varies depending on free & reduced lunch rates) or they charge them the full amount then send them a rebate check at the
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There is nothing stopping the school district from also bringing their own suit for being overcharged.
For those who may have forgotten (Score:2, Insightful)
The old AT&T was broken up into seven smaller companies for very good reasons in the early 80s. Over time, those seven companies have coalesced, and we now have just two left: AT&T and Verizon. It is high time to break them up again lest the monster will arise again.
Re:For those who may have forgotten (Score:4, Interesting)
Are you kidding? The breakup removed Bell's ability to prevent people from attaching arbitrary non-Bell equipment to the phone lines, which made modems practical, which basically made the Internet viable. It also made multiple long distance carriers available to a lot more people than had options previously, which was responsible for a lot of the cash that Sprint eventually used to build a cellular network. So basically, we have the Internet and multiple cellular carriers because the government broke up Ma Bell.
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The carterphone decision in 1968 - long before the breakup in January of 1982 - is what allowed devices to be hooked up to the pots
from Wikipedia:
This particular device was involved in a landmark United States regulatory decision related to telecommunications. In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission allowed the Carterfone and other devices to be connected directly to the AT&T network, as long as they did not cause harm to the system. This ruling (13 F.C.C.2d 420) created the possibility of sellin
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That certain was an important decision, but the Bell System was still requiring customers to have expensive coupler equipment [nytimes.com] installed for many years afterwards (that article was from 1974). Those couplers involved transformers that would have made even 56k modems impractical, much less DSL.
For sure, where I lived, the Bell breakup was the dividing line, after which we were allowed to buy phones from someone other than the phone company. I still remember when we got our first non-Bell telephone, though I
VoIP phones (Score:2)
Not true at all — any Internet-service provider would do. I use two different ones, actually, with 4 different phone numbers. The total monthly cost is about $7 (of which the biggest single part is the "911 fee"). A single phone system handles all the complexity and can route incoming calls to different accounts to different extensions. A problem solved years ago.
My Internet is, incidentally, through Verizon's FiOS, but Comcast cables are going to our n
How many times... (Score:2, Insightful)
Do these communication providers have to get caught with their hands in the cookie jar before real action is taken to punish and prevent them from doing this? I'm talking rate regulation, maximum entitled profit, and punitive damages awarded to the state to regulate, and jail time for knowing violators. If you're not sure you're ripping off your customer, give them a better deal.
This is a true tragedy of the commons. You rarely see this kind of nonsense with actual, regulated utilities. Communication is so
Re:How many times... (Score:4, Funny)
Was Slashdot bought by Conde Nast? (Score:2)
Why are they using E-rate at all? (Score:2)
I keep wondering why they are still using the expensive T1 lines (I think they are up to a T2 line now) when there are three seprate companies that offer business class broadband service to the school.
How much does E-rate subsidise the T1's down to for it to be a better deal than a 50/50Mbps $157/mo business fiber line?
It's not faster or more reliable so why is it that much cheaper?
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Just to note I wasn't talking about the schools in TFA but the schools here in town are still on t1 lines or something else from that same venue.
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3Mbps at 11:00PM at night?
No thats as fast as the line goes... it can't be a single t1 but it could be two t1s bonded.
I just can't figure it out...
So fire the school principals! (Score:2)
If true, then the school principals and techies in the affected school-districts should be fired.
Whoever approved the bills for payments didn't do their job. They should've asked the question: why is my school billed at a higher rate, than I'm paying at home? But they didn't, because it is not their money and thei
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You're making an apples to zebras comparison: Residential telephone services are significantly cheaper than business services--such a disparity is by design. The phone company charges more to businesses because they're using the lines to make a profit and the phone company knows that business customers can't live without phone lines.
Without access to another comparably sized organizations business telephone b
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Overcharging (Score:1)
Ajit Pal (Score:3)
Has this guy ever objected to any action by a telecom company?
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His last name is spelled Pai. And no. Well, he did object once when he was still a Verizon lawyer but that was for a motion by an opposing telecom council so I'm not sure if that counts.
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From Ars:
"Pai issued a statement saying he agrees "that AT&T may have violated that rule in Florida" but says the FCC acted too late, after the one-year statute of limitations. The FCC decision claims that AT&T's 'violations are continuing because the forms have not been corrected and AT&T has retained the excessive reimbursements,' even though the last charges were collected on June 1, 2015."
It's not stuck in the same place in
Fascism... (Score:2)
...is what this economic system is called. Private ownership of industry with total government control and regulation. You fuck over a school district? You will pay fines to the Feds because they say so. When things go south, the Feds just blame all our problems on industry, and continue to fuck things up.
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...is what this economic system is called. Private ownership of industry with total government control and regulation. You fuck over a school district? You will pay fines to the Feds because they say so. When things go south, the Feds just blame all our problems on industry, and continue to fuck things up.
Wrong. If there were total government control over anything then we wouldn't see these types of shenanigans everywhere we look, because even fascists are less obviously biased in favor of big business than our government. Our system is capitalism run amok, with complete and utter regulatory incompetence and impotence overseeing it. That's not fascism, just failure.
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Do you really think that a fascist government is any more competent at regulation? Capitalism requires free market principles. Something that is rapidly disappearing in the united states.