Sprint Nextel Corp. has joined the other telecom companies who have also sued independent phone operators and Internet calling services for alleged “traffic pumping.”
Sprint Nextel’s complaints are virtually identical to filings by AT&T. and Qwest Communications. The carrier said that local exchange companies have been partnering with companies that offer free conference or international calls and adult chat lines.
“Make no mistake—this is not just a billing dispute among phone companies,” said Kent Nakamura, VP of telecom management for Sprint Nextel. He described the situation as “a continued pattern of illegal arbitrage on the part of certain companies—a scheme that attempts to pick our pockets and threatens our customers’ access to unlimited long-distance service.”
Sprint Nextel also said that some operators have within the past year “adopted significantly higher access charges—up to 13 cents per minute—for every minute of every call a Sprint Nextel customer makes to the RLEC’s local calling area. That’s about 26 times the access charges typically charged by other local phone companies.”
This is still a very interesting situation for companies like Citrix since their GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar utilities leverage freeconferencecall.com services, one of the companies that AT&T, Quest, Nextel are going after.
