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October 13, 2009

Verizon Term Liability

During the course of auditing Verizon West/GTE invoices we found that if a circuit on a term plan has a dispute or other correction that updates via a Service Order it can reset the term clock in Verizon's system causing an over charge in term liabilty.

For example we had a circuit that had been in service for 4 years of 5 year term when it disconnected, the term fee should have been 12 months, however in Jan 09 Verizon corrected a mileage error related to a dispute on this circuit via their Service Order correction in the OCC section. When the circuit disconnected several months later and should have billed 12 months of early term fee, Verizon billed over 4 years of early term fees because their system read the last SO activity date as the dispute correction update from January 09. We disputed the overage and won the claim for $12K. When validating early term fee's with Verizon we always verify our last SO activity and make sure it matches to avoid being overcharge.

October 12, 2009

First Steps on a Long Road...

Do you remember, when you first entered the Telecom industry, and realized ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) meant something other than an automated teller machine? Or do you remember, when you heard first time CLLI, POTS, etc?
There are so many terms and abbreviations relating to Telecom. I found the solution. Here is a Telecom Terms Glossary and Dictionary http://www.javvin.com/telecomglossary/. It’s free on-line. You can find any abbreviations and terms you are likely to run across most often in Telecom .

For instance, POTS - Plain Old Telephone Service
Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) is the standard, analog telephone service which remains the basic form of residential and small business telephone service nearly everywhere in the world. Plain Old Telephone Service was originally known as the Post Office Telephone Service in many countries. It has been available almost since the introduction of the telephone system in the late 19th century, mostly unchanged to the normal user, despite the introduction of electronic telephone exchanges into the public switched telephone network since the middle of the 20th century.

And there is a more comprehensive tool - Newton's Telecom Dictionary - The Dictionary of Telecommunications, Networking and The Internet. It has become the industry "Bible".
http://www.harrynewton.com/bigdic.html

October 05, 2009

SBC: Invoice specific system. How to avoid late fees.

Looking at a credit balance invoice and not sure why there is an LPC? If it happens to be SBC billing, this is very common situation. Since their system is invoice specific, it’s quite possible that there is a credit and a debit just sitting out there, unapplied. For example, if you withhold an amount on one invoice and receive credit on another, SBC doesn’t have a systematic way of applying them against each other. How to fix this? Provide a blanket LOA/authorization for open credits to be applied against open debits within the same BAN. Keep in mind to specify your authorization to include credits/debits in the same account, regardless of the dollar amounts. This blanket LOA/authorization will eliminate the need of individual credit transfer requests within the same account as well as generation of late fees.