CLECs Should Know About the Selector

Consumer Reports and TeleBright have teamed up to build a phone plan selector that many residences and small businesses will use to choose their phone plan. Is your CLEC listed on the selector?

by ISP-Planet Staff [January 17, 2003]

The non-profit consumer advocate magazine and website Consumer Reports has teamed up with TeleBright, a telecoms pricing applications specialist firm, to produce a Web-based long distance phone plan selector that is currently available for free here.

CLECs that are currently not listed in the selector can contact TeleBright and if they pass TeleBright's eight point checklist, they will be listed on the site and may be listed in other TeleBright reports. The TeleBright checklist involves several steps, including asking the Better Business Bureau and similar sources whether the applicant is a viable company and whether or not it has outstanding customer service issues or other problems.

David Heim, deputy editor of Consumer Reports, told us, "we have an affiliation with TeleBright. Major telcos, such as Verizon and AT&T, are pretty much listed by default. Companies can ask to be listed and users of the selector can ask that a company be included; TeleBright actively solicits such changes to the selector. That said, asking to be included doesn't guarantee a place on the selector."

Consumer Reports charges separate subscription fees for its print magazine and its website. The print magazine will mention the selector in the February 2003 issue. The selector is free to all for now, but a few months from now it will become available only to Consumer Reports website subscribers.

Heim is proud of the selector's independence. He noted, "Some of the other phone-rate selectors are subsidiaries of one or another telco—or have some other commercial tie to companies they are listing. We're different, in that Consumer Reports never accepts any outside advertising or remuneration from another company, and Telebright is independent when it comes to the companies it lists in the selector. Indeed, the affiliation between Consumer Reports and Telebright is non-monetary; we share the goal of wanting to help consumers thread their way through the complicated, rapidly changing landscape of long-distance, cellular, and all-in-one telephone rates."

Heim said that he does not plan a selector for ISP service. Consumer Reports covered home networking in September of 2002, and did a customer satisfaction survey of ISPs in 2001, which it does not plan to update. The editors are examining Internet telephony (VoIP) but have no specific plans to cover it yet.

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