Kyle
Seattle,#2UPDATE Employee
Fri, December 17, 2004
Being an ex-employee of Qwest, I can also agree with you that USBI, ESBI, Vartec, and all the other third party billers are quite simply a ripoff, but let me widen your narrow mind with a little history: Qwest is an ILEC, or Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, also a BOC, or Bell Operating Company. Simply, they own all of the phones lines in our areas. CLECs, or Competitive Local Exchange Carriers, are all of the other resellers like Cox and McCleod who lease our phone network. Being the ILEC means heavy regulation, including FCC mandates to providing equal access to the network for CLECs. They are also mandated by the FCC to accept billing contracts with third party vendors, so they are required to display the USBI charges on their bill. Deal with USBI, where the problem started. P.S.- Where did you learn grammar, Tacoma?
Jim
Wisconsin,#3Consumer Suggestion
Fri, November 12, 2004
I work for another phone company and can tell you that by law qwest has to bill the usbi charges on there statement and that there is no other relationship between qwest and usbi. The why that the agreement is set up is that qwest pays the charges on your behalf to USBI and in turn bills them to you. On the statement you got from qwest it should have a contact number for usbi to get further details of what the charges are for. Often times USBI will charge for collect and third party calls. To seek credit for the calls you do need to call USBI so that they can forward credits to Qwest for the charges -