Eliminating Toll Calls to Telenet
by Grant Ingle

Do you live in an area where dialing into Telenet is a toll call? Does the total of your Telenet calls approach your monthly bill for connect charges? Well, I've discovered a way around this nagging problem that doesn't involve taking out a mortgage for a 10,000 baud modem or moving your household closer to the Telenet node.

Very simply, all you need to do is *move* the Telenet node closer to
*you*!!!! In just a few weeks, I will have succeeded in getting a node moved to Amherst MA, and I want to tell you how.

First, get out your phone book and examine your toll-free dialing area. You need to identify the exchanges that are likely to have the highest number of *potential* Telenet users with the same problem as you. Think about where the local college is, where the businesses are, or where all the BMW's are parked.

Then, get the phone number of your local Telenet sales office by calling Telenet Customer Service at 800-336-0437. Call up the sales office and ask them when they're planning to put a local node in your area. Tell them that the current situation forces you to use Uninet although you really prefer Telenet's technical superiority and great customer support. These sales folks work on commission and are always looking for promising opportunities.

Tell all your friends to do the same. Have lunch with the directors of telecommunications at the local colleges and corporations and explain how supporting your plan will generate impressive cost savings for them.

Put an announcement on the local bulletin board and make repeat calls every week or so to the sales office.

Overwhelmed by good business sense, Telenet will probably put a node in your area and evaluate its level of usage for the first month or so, to make sure they've made a wise investment. So... make sure it gets used a *lot* during this period or it may suddenly evaporate.

When I first made this suggestion online, Roger Bunting responded with
another money-saving tip:

"Great advice, Grant! Now that's the way to circumvent the system! Another way to reduce the charges is to use what the Pacific Bell folks call Optional Calling Measured Service. My guess is that the other regional phone companies have similar services. You pay $2.50 per month for one hour's worth of calling during regular business hours to a city within your area code but which would otherwise be a toll call (and within which there just might already be a Telenet access node). The neat thing is that in the evening and on weekends, calls to that same city are FREE! Once I discovered this service, my phone bills went way down." The same strategy might also work for other packet-switching systems and regional phone services too!

So.....good luck....and let me know what happens, OK?

Author's Note: Grant Ingle is an internal consultant in the Office of
Human Relations at the University of Massachusetts. He specializes in
meeting management and using resource networking to solve problems
creatively. He likes living in the woods of Western Massachusetts but
doesn't intend to let that limit his computer conferencing!