This discussion is Beehive CEO's - monthly column as found on the last page of Americas Network magazine. They have been printing his letters for nearly 20 years. This column will remain posted till he writes the next one. The Last Word..                                      August 1997 This column is an update on the Beehive/Bellcore disagreement that’s been boiling for the last three years. The e-mail thanked me for a grandiose refund of overcharges by Bellcore. You're welcome. Cash Cow Bellcore and I have been squabbling over their rates and business promises for years. To put an end to it, last year Bellcore came in and took all 10,000 of Beehive customer 800 numbers. Put us out of the 800 business. Those numbers are now - by Federal Court Order - frozen for use by anybody. Except for the 200 not disconnected at the moment the Federal Court Judge ordered Bellcore to "stop" taking the numbers.  I got mad. The question is, has all the dirt we've dug up cost the BOC operating companies that cool $57.7 mil that they are now giving back from admitted overcharges? And how much goes from the BOC to BOC? WHAT EQUITY? I've said for years that the BOC have been getting cheaper rates for use of the 800 signaling system than my little company pays. It goes like this: The BOC’s own Bellcore. Bellcore designed and operates the SMS 800 system. Everyone is forced to use it to route 800 calls to the network. Folks like Beehive who had an operating 800 system could no longer depend on our in house system(s) unless we paid tribute to Bellcore. And Bellcore charged big bucks to store numbers in their computers and smaller bucks to access the data. Profits returned to the owners of Bellcore were said to be in the order of seven million dollars per month If you own the monopoly store that makes profits such that even the owners pay retail, the owners are, in fact, getting the service cheaper -- through profits -- than we non-owners. The former high school coach who runs the SMS data base "team" says he does what the BOC Board of Directors tells him to do: earn money.  But, Congress, in the 1996 Telecommunications Act, said that such a cozy relationship as the SMS800 operation or number portability, cannot be operated by an interested party  Yes! The BOC cash cow had to be got rid of.  So a buyer was found. The SMS800 team began to distance themselves from the BOC's and Bellcore not only in anticipation of the sale, but also to reduce the publicity of my court filings about the secretive ways they operate, plus the huge profits being paid to their BOC owners.   Before the deal could be consummated, the FCC said Bellcore had to return those excess charges. At least one Bell complained that nobody said the BOC’s had to operate the system for free. Another said everyone booked the costs of creating the SMS800 deal as an expense at the time, so how could they justify any fees but operational costs? Interesting point.  Bellcore said the FCC had to approve a waiver before Bellcore could return the money. (Yet the coach told me "no way he could settle with Beehive," because "tariffs" prohibited change and a settlement would require FCC approval! (A matter of scale, I suppose.) In May, the FCC said Bellcore could give back some of the overcharges. In a letter to all Resborgs from "the SMS management team", Bellcore styled the return of $57.7 Million as a "variance". They also said the "team" was "delighted... and pleased" to refund the overcharges. Sure they were.  Although the sale to SAIC is said to be a done deal, the lady is not to sing until this fall. As of June 12, Bellcore said it is nothing more than a "software" house and doesn't have anything to do with the SMS/800 management team operation. "A software house?" So who owns the team? More than a few folk wonder if the sale includes fat license fees for the over 200,000 lines of C+ software and its continued use to operate the SMS800 system? Can software tippy toe in the tulips? Is there a connection that the same 800 programming/hardware methods be used for local number portability (LNP)? As suggested in this column last month in July 1, might it be better to adopt the Microsoft Internet proposal as cheaper and more suited to the future? One regulatory engineer opines that because now that the cow is out of the barn with BOC contracts already let, there is nothing that can be done to change the path taken by the BOC’s in their "compliance" with FCC demands for LNP before the end of the 3rd quarter. Our industry is firmly clutching antiquity as we madly go over the precipice down to the future.   **   Copyright 1997 by A. W. Brothers and Americas Network magazine. All rights reserved.   © 1997, 1998, 1999 Beehive Telephone Co.