     Are all of you folks out there in BBS  land  aware  of  what  the
phone  companies  are  trying  to  pull  off this year? Well, here's a
synopsis of a thread that I've been tracking for the past  few  weeks.
According  to  Bill  Blomgren,  a BBS operator, the phone companies in
several states have decided that ANY BBS SYSTEM is a  business.   What
that means is that the 12 year old running a little board on his Apple
2 may now have to pay full business rates.  That is the $50 per  month
base  rate,  plus  increases  (massive)  in  long  distance  and other
charges.  Example: local rates...  Touch Tone  residential:  $.50  per
month..   Business:  $2.50  per  month....  Long distance rates almost
double...  and so on.

     The Phone Company does not care if the line is used  for  friends
only.    If  the  board  appears  on   any   list,  it  is  considered
"advertising", accepts any $, it is a profit maker...  accepts uploads
(Guess what they think shareware is? Compensation)....

     As  you  can  imagine, local BBS are under great economic threat.
Not many of them can afford tripling or quadrupling of the phone bill.
Indiana's  PUC  threw out the challenge to the new rates from GTE, and
Bell has already has  a  similar  request  pending,  waiting  for  the
decision.  In MI, there is a company charging not only business rates,
but an extra $$$$  per  month  for  'Processing'  and  line  charges..
Special  services for modem operations...  In Texas...boards that take
a penny, or have more than 3 lines are businesses..

     Here's another example: a guy had an 'adult'  board  up  with  15
lines.   Had  it running for around 5 or 6 months when word got spread
on a talk station that it existed.  GTE IMMEDIATELY billed him for  15
lines  of  business service, retroactively, and closed him down 4 days
later when he couldn't immediately come  up  with  $3000.   The  phone
company  can  usually  do  whatever it wants with your bill.  The only
exception is the little old lady who dials out once a month and gets 4
calls a month.

     Granted,  this  is  an extreme example.  Reasonably speaking, any
board with 15 lines is almost certainly charging for the service,  and
hopefully making some money for the operator.

     I  don't  think  any  reasonable person would object to large BBS
which are operated as profit making businesses being charged  business
phone  rates.   What  frightens  me  is what appears to be arbitrarily
defined criteria for business classification.  While 15 lines  into  a
subscription  BBS  may  clearly  be a business, I don't think that one
line into a non- or minimal subscription BBS is anything more  than  a
hobby, and needs to be protected as such.

     Here  are  some more horror stories.  According to Ryan Ritenour,
all BBS's in Elkhart, Indiana are being  charged  business  rates  for
their  lines.   This  has been going on now for several months.  While
some small time BBS's may get away without paying higher rates  for  a
while,  Ryan  believes  that they will soon get hit too.  According to
Ryan,  several  boards  have  already  closed  down  because  of   the
additional cost, while most other BBS's are going subscription.

     And if you think this is an isolated incident, think twice.  Once
all the other phone companies get wind of GTE charging  higher  rates,
they are all going to want to do it too.  Eventually this will lead to
the modem and fax user.

     There's more.  According to Bill Blomgren, on  a  recent  COSUARD
conference,  there was a week of discussion about boards shutting down
in one area around Detroit, where the phone Co.  not only reclassified
them  as  businesses,  but  insisted that as a data processing service
they HAD to buy extra cost services, including $50 per month per  line
for  'special  handling'.   The lines ended up costing $100 per month,
which cropped a couple hundred BBS lines down to 3-6 in a little  over
a month.

     Bill believes that there are two important points that need to be
made about the phone companies in his area.  1) GTE has decided to get
into  the  "Data  distribution  and sales" business.  As part of that,
they declared that "They would have to deal with the  competition"  to
make  their efforts profitable.  Guess who the competition is? You got
it, the local BBS.  2) They are looking for  new  sources  of  revenue
without  any additional installation of equipment.  The best way to do
that is to find  ways  of  making  lines  already  installed  pay  for
business rates, and in his area, they are doing that retroactively.

     OK, so what do we do? See the next message for some suggestions.
