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San Diego, CA, May 29, 1998 (DLD Digest) - We received the following press release from the One Plus Agent Association (OPAA) today, which we believe you will find of great interest. About two months ago, we at the One Plus Agent Association (OPAA) started receiving an overwhelming number of agent calls regarding NOS's new 7.9 cent a minute retail program. Agents wanted to know how they could sell it or sell against it.

They also wanted to know what the deal was regarding the way NOS billed its customers in "total call units (TCUs)" instead of actual minutes. We took it upon ourselves to look into the matter and this is what we discovered. The first thing we did was to call NOS. We were quickly referred to their legal department when we asked for an official statement. Their legal representative declined to comment about the TCU billing method. They additionally suggested that since NOS had no currently active agent program, OPAA need not be concerned with NOS.

We then queried the 1,800+ OPAA agent database to determine if anyone was in fact selling the NOS 7.9 cent program. Several agents did state they could and/or were selling the program. Some agents said they and their customers loved NOS. Others agents said the opposite. None had a serious understanding of the TCU billing issue such that they could clearly explain it "for the record". At this point we did not feel we could say one thing or another about NOS in any sort of official capacity.

What we could do was investigate the TCU issue more closely. Since some of the lines OPAA uses for long distance are directly billed by NOS, we called the NOS customer service department for a TCU explanation. Since we don't want to get sued by NOS we will not attempt to rephrase for you what they told us. Suffice it to say their explanation did not enable us to know how many TCU's we would be charged for on the bill if we made a call that lasted exactly 1 minute. We asked them if they could fax us an example of how they calculate TCUs. They faxed us not a sample calculation but a single paragraph stating that they bill in TCUs which are not minutes and that TCUs are calculated by combining several different numbers. At this point we still didn't know what a TCU was so we had no way of knowing what 7.9 cents a minute meant on a NOS bill.

We decided to get NOS' California state PUC tariff & the federal FCC tariff and read it for ourselves. The California PUC tariff is 30 pages long. The FCC tariff is over 150 pages. We found what we were looking for and it became increasingly clear to us just how the TCU issue works on a customer bill. We hesitated to put the information out though as we don't command a great deal of legal resources in case we were sued.

Then just this week we received a single piece of paper in our most recent NOS bill. It is printed front and back in a light aqua colored ink (which made it very difficult to photocopy or fax). It seems to be NOS' own 2-page summary of their tariff and their method of calculating call charges. It even gives two examples. The first example shows how at a rate of 14.9 cents per minute a 9-minute call will get billed 18.5 TCUs for a total cost of $2.76. The second example shows how at the same 14.5 cent a minute rate a 40-minute call will get billed 60.5 TCUs for a total of $9.02. The same piece of paper also supplies a table helpful in determining the TCU charge for any call between 1 and 1,200 seconds or above. If you're trying to understand exactly how to do a comparison of any carrier that bills in regular minutes to NOS that bills in TCUs, we believe that this information will be very helpful to you. We're glad to pass it on to current OPAA members at no charge.