Toll-free Internet access coming Rural users to avoid long-distance fees

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Even though he lives on an island, Les Ranquist wants to connect to the rest of the world without paying a hefty price for doing so. He wants to sign on to the Internet for the same monthly fee city dwellers are paying.

Right now, Ranquist pays $25 for 40 hours of Internet access and $1 more for each hour after 40. Plus, he pays long-distance toll charges every time he’s signed on to the Web. He can’t take advantage of advertised packages of unlimited use for one rate like other Web surfers in the state, and with an Internet-literate wife and three school-age children, 40 hours doesn’t last long.

The bill has “run into hundreds of dollars some months,” he said.

Ranquist, the owner of a shellfish company called Underwater Taxi on Swans Island, said he feels stranded. The World Wide Web isn’t as wide open as people would think.

“It’s hard because you would hope you wouldn’t be left behind,” Ranquist said this week.

But there’s hope for Ranquist and the estimated 10 percent of telephone users statewide who currently have to pay long distance charges to gain access to the Internet.

Sometime this summer, they will just have to place a toll-free call – 1-500- and a seven-digit number – to get access to an Internet provider almost anywhere in the state. The 500-number exchange will be designated solely for toll-free Internet access.

“It looks like a toll call, but it can’t be billed as a toll call,” Phil Lindley, a spokesman for the Maine Public Utilities Commission, said of the 500-number.

It took four years of negotiations among the PUC, Verizon Communications, Internet service providers and independent telephone companies in Maine to get to the point where an equitable Internet access system could be put in place statewide.

Last fall, the PUC ordered Verizon, Internet providers and independent telephone companies to set up an integrated, Internet-traffic-only phone system that would give customers in rural communities and on the islands access to the Internet without having to pay for a long-distance call to do it.

The PUC told the independent telephone companies to install call-routing equipment that would immediately switch any 500-number, toll-free Internet call from their customers to a trunk of lines already in place by Verizon, the state’s largest telephone company, which covers 85 percent of Maine’s market.

For more than a year, toll-free access to the Internet has not been a problem for people in rural communities that use Verizon for their in-state long-distance service. Verizon set up a 500-number system in early 2001 and many Internet service providers signed up with Verizon to use it. Some of the providers, in turn, expanded their markets and offered their Internet-access service to people in rural towns.

But the independent telephone companies, with their own lines and equipment, didn’t install similar equipment for 500-number service primarily because the cost was too high. Instead, over the years, the independents have offered their own Internet-access service for a limited-use, flat fee that their customers could access just like they were making a local call.

For a few years, that was Ranquist’s only choice, but he said the connections weren’t always reliable. Then, when he could select another Internet company, Ranquist said he had to decide whether to pay long-distance charges each time he signed on.

A few technical details still need to be worked out in the agreement between Verizon and the independent telephone companies, which is expected to be signed by the end of the week. But an equipment installation schedule has been put into place for each of the independents to link up with Verizon in the next few months.

“All of Maine will have access to the Internet,” Lindley said. “It’s all a matter of hooking up the wires.”

How it works

After years of fighting about who was going to pay and how much to link up independents and Internet service providers with Verizon, all parties now are saying it’s a win-win business venture for each of them.

And the Internet service providers are preparing to compete among themselves for customers who in the past would have been considered out of reach.

But it’s the customer – the person who chooses one of the many Internet service providers doing business in the state – who should be coming out ahead, according to the PUC. The commission has told Verizon, the independents and the Internet service providers that they should not be passing on the expense to customers for setting up a toll-free access system. The actual cost of setting up the system will vary by Internet service provider and by independent telephone company.

Will the costs somehow be factored into Internet packages? Probably not, said some of the state’s Internet service providers. Competition among them for customers should keep Internet access packages attractive and affordable.

“I think [rates] would go down, actually, because of competition,” said Rebecca Loveland, marketing coordinator for Mid-Maine Communications in Bangor.

How the toll-free Internet access system will be paid for involves a dynamic that has more routes than a microchip. In essence, Internet service providers will pay Verizon a flat monthly fee to use their 500-number trunk lines, said Ben Sanborn, an attorney for the Telephone Association of Maine. Verizon then will pay the independent telephone companies at least $400 a month for each trunk line the independent’s customers use.

All the equipment and the trunk lines are separate from the lines used for regular or emergency telephone calls.

For the customer, if the Internet service provider has a local access number, that is the line that would be used to go online. If not, the customer would select the 500-number toll-free line to get onto the Web.

Competition likely

Paying a flat monthly fee to gain access to Verizon’s dedicated 500-number lines is worth it, said John McCatherin, spokesman for Prexar. It opens up the entire state as a possible market to Internet service providers in a small period of time. In the past, if the companies wanted to expand, they would have to spend money to install equipment in each of the towns they targeted.

“Clearly I would not want to limit any independent caller from having access to other Internet providers,” said Jason Gay, system operations manager at Mid-Maine Communications. “They should have access to all the areas I don’t have.”

For years, numerous Internet service providers have established themselves in territories throughout the state, said Fletcher Kittredge, president of Great Works Internet in Biddeford.

AOL Time Warner and Road Runner, with their high-speed Internet access lines, have a strong presence in southern Maine, while Adelphia, which purchased Maine Internet Works, has a strong market share in Augusta. Prexar, which bought Acadia, is the primary Internet service provider in the Bangor and Ellsworth areas. In Rockland, it’s Mid-Maine Communications.

Kittredge, whose company has been advertising its Internet service statewide, said he does not believe that competition will heat up among the state’s dominant Internet providers when the toll-free access system is completed. GWI has been using the 500-number service for almost a year, and competition for subscribers in the towns hasn’t developed yet, he said.

But in the rural areas, “there might be more competition,” he said, because the towns and the islands account for at least 10 percent of the state’s market – a market that virtually has been untapped.

Independent telephone customers in rural areas and on the islands have to be careful when shopping around for an Internet service provider, said Mike Reed, a spokesman for TDS-Telecom, which operates seven independent telephone companies in Maine. Not all Internet service providers will be hooking up to Verizon’s 500-number trunk lines, he said, and not all of them will want to market their Internet service statewide.

On Swans Island, Ranquist is hoping that at least one Internet service provider will want his business and allow him to access its system by a toll-free call. He currently is studying whether satellite access to the Internet is an economical alternative to what he is using now. Ranquist should have his answer by this summer.

“That’s the target, but I haven’t seen it yet,” he said.