Monthly Bill Fatigue
105421
Economists are growing concerned over Americans' willingness to cede regular chunks of their paychecks to new conveniences and services, saying it is taking a bite out of discretionary spending, a key driver of the nation's economy.
618468
If you do the math on the meters, you are just about breaking even on them the first year. What makes the city believe that the maintenance will be $800 ("New meters raising revenues and hackles ," Nov. 20 )? How about the replacement factor for meters that are broken beyond repair? This sounds like a loser to me. I ...
431353
(InfoWorld) - On Monday evening, my wife reached me on my mobile phone. She was spending a long weekend with her family in Maine. "I've called our home phone several times," she said. "And I keep getting a busy signal." That night, I didn't think twice about the phone problem. We have been VoIP customers for more than a year, and flaky service has been standard operating procedure. I reset my VoIP converter box and crossed my fingers. Then, on Tuesday, when the problems persisted, I called my VoIP provider, SunRocket, and got the message that the company was no longer taking tech support and sales calls. That's not good. Many free-market analysts and large telecom providers have hailed this as a new era of competition. It's a wonderful new world where your VoIP provider can cut off your home phone service without warning. This week, SunRocket went belly up without any communication to its 200,000 customers. SunRocket had been providing both my home and my home office phone service. I could charitably say that phone service since Monday evening has been intermittent. In reality, phone service has been mostly dead with occasional spurts of dial tone. Now, when business associates try to call my home office, they get either a busy signal, or they get one ring and a hang-up. I'm trying to switch my home and office numbers to Vonage, but they say it could take up to 10 days for the switch to happen. When I first heard about SunRocket more than a year ago, it seemed like a good solution to large monthly telephone bills. The local incumbent phone service was charging about $60 a month for unlimited local and long distance. SunRocket offered unlimited local andÂ long distance and even some international calling for $199 a year. The company also offered a second out-of-area-code phone number at no cost. That feature caught my eye because my home office is in suburban Maryland, but most of the people who call me are located in Washington, D.C. My wife and I looked at a savings of more than $500 a year and decided it was time to check out VoIP. The switch was not without problems. Voice quality was spotty at best, particularly when we were talking to someone on a mobile phone. For months, we had problems with frequently dropped calls. We soon became quite familiar with the "not-my-fault" phenomenon. SunRocket blamed the problems on Comcast, our broadband provider. Comcast, of course, blamed SunRocket. (Comcast: We can't guarantee quality of service for third-party applications. By the way, why don't you switch to our voice over IP service -- it only costs double what you're paying now.) After months of experimenting with equipment configuration, we finally got most of the problems ironed out. When it came time to renew our annual subscription, we had mixed feelings, but SunRocket was still significantly cheaper that most alternatives. We paid $199 for a year of service in March. In late June, in a sign of things to come, SunRocket laid off about a quarter of its workforce. The way I look at it, someone owes us about nine months of phone service, but we're not holding our breath. Now, in some ways, this is just a story about a couple hundred thousand VoIP customers who saw their phone service go dead without warning. But there's a larger context here. During the last couple of years, some telecom analysts, free-market think tanks, and telecom carriers have trumpeted a new era of competition. Their argument: Old, monopoly-style regulations aren't needed any more because there's all kinds of competition out there. They say that telecom carriers shouldn't have to share their networks with competitors and broadband providers shouldn't be prohibited from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors because there's all kinds of competition out there. Meanwhile, SunRocket, the second largest independent VoIP provider, has shut down. Vonage, the largest independent VoIP provider, has faced a patent infringement lawsuit from giant competitor Verizon, and its future is uncertain. Verizon contends it owns the patent to the technology that translates VoIP calls and allows them to connect to traditional telephone networks. Wireless phone carriers provide some competition, but the largest two wireless carriers are owned by the two giant telecom carriers. I'm not sure that counts as competition. In the broadband space, there are some indications that one or two new competitors are on the way, but it could take years. Right now, well over 90 percent of the U.S. has at most two broadband providers, the cable company or the telecom carrier. The telecom carriers are fighting against auction rules that would encourage a new broadband provider when a chunk of television spectrum is freed up in early 2009. Elsewhere, broadband customers in other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pay less for faster service. Japanese customers pay about one-seventh what U.S. customers do per megabit of bandwidth. But few people in D.C. want to talk about the real reasons for this. It's not free-market competition; instead, telecom services in many other countries are highly regulated and subsidized by the government. For some of us, the promise of telecom competition seems a long way off. And, by the way, if you want to find me during the next week, your best bet is probably e-mail.
242000
Attack your debt if the holidays have you wringing your hands over credit card bills.
15285
Homeowners unable to pay monthly mortgage bills and facing foreclosure shouldn't count on help from Washington this year. Regulators and lawmakers seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach as they confront the fallout from several years of lenders making too many home loans to people with inadequate credit.
16664
Unpredictable hospital billing can lead to financial anxiety about the prospect of dealing with insurance companies even before a surgery has happened.
9245
WASHINGTON - A cash-flow problem in a federal program is hindering the ability of many schools and libraries to pay for Internet service.
758557
District residents using Pepco Holdings Inc. can expect to pay an average $10 more a month on their electric bill next year. The Washington power company, which supplies power to an estimated
355588
Still not using online bill-pay? Here's how (and why) to get with the program.
618299
DreamHost customers woke up to a nightmare on Tuesday after the Web hosting company made a major billing mistake overnight that has resulted in many getting their credit cards charged automatically for hundreds -- and even thousands -- of dollars.In an official blog posting, the company said that Monday night it ran &quot;a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007&quot; but by mistake set the overdue-payment parameter for the end of 2008.&quot;This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking the havoc that we are so sorry you had to be put through,&quot; the posting reads.The wording on the posting seems to indicate that all of DreamHost&#39;s customers were affected by the billing mistake. DreamHost hosts more than 600,000 domains, according to its Web site.WebHosting.Info, a research and statistics portal focused on the Web services industry, lists DreamHost as the 11th-largest Web hosting provider in the U.S. and the 15th-largest in the world .DreamHost, which has been in business since 1997, didn&#39;t immediately reply to requests for comment.At press time, DreamHost was in the process of issuing refunds to customers who got charged automatically.Among the hundreds of mostly angry comments that customers have made to the blog posting are complaints that the billing pushed credit card accounts over their limit, triggering bank penalty fees and locking up cards.&quot;If I end up having to pay special interest fees because you trigger an overbalance, I&#8217;ll be contacting your billing team for compensation,&quot; wrote one customer.Other customers commented that they are spooked that DreamHost could make a mistake of this magnitude with something as sensitive as billing, and have thus decided to cancel their accounts.&quot;My account is due for renewal at the end of this month, and barring something spectacular, it looks like I&#39;m taking my business elsewhere,&quot; wrote another customer.A quick scan of the company&#39;s DreamHost Status blog shows that it has encountered a steady stream of system outages over the past month or so.
738417
More than two million households struggle to keep up with council tax bills in the UK, a study concludes.
233613
Health plan fees are soaring and many of the nationâs early retirees are having a hard time paying the bills.
573835
WASHINGTON - Interest rates on short-term Treasury bills were mixed in auction yesterday with rates on three-month bills rising while six-month bills dropped to the lowest level in two years.
419819
Electricity shortages and gas supply problems predicted to push bills up.
428400
Treasury bills were mixed after seesawing through the week. Bonds rallied at midweek, after the Federal Reserve signaled it would likely raise its benchmark overnight interest rate in small steps in coming
325094
Given the current economic climate, is AmEx about to charge it up?
13228
Â· Charity donations take total bill to Â£2.5mÂ· Broadcaster to sue telephone services firm