Customers have been warned that the use of discount carriers for international calls from Lattelekom equipment is illegal. But Lattelekom has already blocked calls to the "magic" numbers that allow customers lower phone charges.
"None of our customers are using callbacks because Lattelekom has blocked all our customers calls," said Alexandrs Prancs, a representative from Telegroup, a U.S.-based company in Iowa.
Callback is a subscriber service by which the caller dials a telephone number in the United States, hangs up and waits for a computer to call him back. When the customer answers, he gets an open line on a U.S. exchange that allows him to place his call at rates generally cheaper than those offered by the local telephone service.
Lattelekom's latest move in cutting off the 10 customers makes him happy, said Prancs, and he hopes the action will put the discount call issue under a strong light for further definition.
"If they are sure of their position and have had enough time to consider the basis and then disconnect service, let them go ahead. It will be a good test case," Prancs said.
No one knows the nature of the beast, and court action could give it an outline, Prancs said.
People have been using methods for lowering long distance rates for a long time - calling collect to fictitious persons and letting phones ring a predetermined number of times to signal relatives to call through a cheaper telephone service.
"Nobody has any understanding of callbacks. There are 20 ways to do it. There is the man who writes to his friend in another country and tells him to call him at a certain day and moment," Prancs said. "Even the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) doesn't have any definition of what is a callback. Only one or two kinds of callbacks can be detected by Lattelekom."
ITU is a major representative of developing telecommunication groups in developing nations.
An attorney retained by Telegroup, said that the company would abstain from further comment for now.
Call-back companies, known as "redirect" companies, grew up in the early 1990s to offer cheaper service in South America and CIS countries where there are phone monopolies. Through Latvia's telecommunication laws, Lattelekom gained a monopoly for the next 20 years, until 2014.
A statement from Lattelekom on Aug. 17 said that "Lattelekom cannot deliberately ignore such actions by its clients that are inconsistent with national interests and applicable Latvian laws." Only Lattelekom has the right to provide basic as well as international voice services, the company maintains.
Lattelekom says that such callback schemes use the company's infrastructure without paying to develop and preserve it. Callback companies say that they do contribute through accounting rates paid to the local company every time a call-back phone call enters Latvia.
In Europe, seven companies are under investigation by European Union antitrust officials to determine if the seven are possibly charging other companies excessive accounting fees to forward international calls within the EU, according to a report in the International Herald Tribune.
Please enter your username and password.
2024 © The Baltic Times /Cookies Policy
