900 ways to make money

Communications News, July, 1990 by Bob Gitlin

One notorious application was Dial-A-Santa, in which children were urged to hold their telephones up to the TV set in order to set off a tone that made a phone call.

Another--the $2000 dial-a-porn phone bill racked up by a pubescent suburbanite armed with Daddy's Visa--has largely been curtailed by LEC refusal to chase the money of such IPs.

Telesphere, a pioneer of such things as flexible billing and non-barge-in service, initially ran a high incidence of uncollectables, as the LECs scrambled to figure out how to collect the money.

Telesphere has reported new schedules in which lower collectables will be retained.

Some argue that even the old holdback rate didn't amount to much of a difference when compared with AT&T, MCI, and Sprint.

"The stockholders of none of these companies would compensate an IP whose callers refuse to pay that portion of their phone bills," says Summers. "An IP, one way or another, is gonna be charged for uncollectables."

Byzantine confusion plagues the 900 business.

Figuring out the hierarchy--who does what in a labyrinth of service bureaus, marketing companies, production companies, and hangers-on--seems a lifetime education in itself.

But analysts say now is the time to get involved in 900.

If you hit on the right idea, and execute it artfully, you may stumble onto some national market clout you only dreamed of with telemarketing and direct mail.

Just don't think there won't be any surprises.