As of Friday, March 9, it’s come to our attention that Cingular Wireless has begun blocking all conference calls made from Cingular handsets to selected conference numbers. If you call our service, you receive a recording that says, “This call is not allowed from this number. Please dial 611 for customer service”.These are some of the very same telephone companies that claim that we have nothing to fear if there is no net neutrality.Earlier this week, Sprint and Qwest joined in this action, blocking cellular and land line calls to these same numbers. This appears to be a coordinated effort to force you to use the paid services they provide, eliminating competition and blocking your right to use the conferencing services that work best for you.
Here’s the full text of the letter from Freeconferencecall.com.
The public interest advocate group PennPIRG says of AT&T/Cingular:
The telephone giant has argued that calls to free conference call services are resulting in millions of dollars in losses to the company due to re-routing and termination fees, and has sued free conference call services and local phone companies in Iowa over the fees.PennPIRG has also gotten AT&T/Cingular to confirm that they are in fact blocking calls to Freeconferencecall.com:
After receiving a tip from a consumer in Illinois who was blocked from accessing a conference call on his cellular phone, PennPIRG confirmed the practice with several customer service representatives at Cingular/AT&T, as well as with customer service at Free Conference Call.com. PennPIRG also confirmed the blocks by calling several phone numbers used by Free Conference Call.com on a Cingular cellular phone.So here we have a case of the biggest U.S. telco blocking a telephone service that competes with one of their own services, and yet we are supposed to believe that they would never do that with Internet services.
Enforced net neutrality or more competition, or both; those seem like the solutions.
-jsq