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LEC billing is a form of billing for Internet-based or other usually electronic services where the user is charged through their account with the local telephone company (also known as the local exchange carrier or LEC), rather than directly from the provider of the service.
LEC billing is permitted in the United States as the breakup of the Bell System forced local telcos out of the long-distance business; each client would otherwise receive multiple monthly bills (one for local service, one for long distance). There is no LEC billing for alternate long-distance carriers in Canada as Bell Canada and Telus remain in the long-distance business and do not collect on behalf of their competitors.
The LEC billing system is subject to abuse by vendors. Cramming is a form of phone fraud in which a third-party vendor adds unauthorised charges to a subscriber's local telephone bill.
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Local exchange carrier (LEC) is a regulatory term in telecommunications for the local telephone company.
Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term phreak is a sensational spelling of the word freak with the ph- from phone, and may also refer to the use of various audio frequencies to manipulate a phone system. Phreak, phreaker, or phone phreak are names used for and by individuals who participate in phreaking.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the first significant overhaul of telecommunications law in more than sixty years, amending the Communications Act of 1934. The Act, signed by President Bill Clinton, represented a major change in American telecommunication law, since it was the first time that the Internet was included in broadcasting and spectrum allotment.
The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) is a telephone numbering plan that encompasses twenty-five distinct regions in twenty countries primarily in North America, including the Caribbean. Some North American countries, most notably Mexico, do not participate in the NANP.
4-1-1 is the telephone number for local directory assistance in Canada and the United States. Until the early 1980s, 4-1-1 and the related 1-1-3 calls were free in most states.
A competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC), in the United States and Canada, is a telecommunications provider company competing with other, already established carriers, generally the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC).
Telephone slamming is an illegal telecommunications practice, in which a subscriber's telephone service is changed without their consent. Slamming became a more visible issue after the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the mid-1980s, especially after several brutal price wars between the major telecommunications companies. The term slamming was coined by Mick Ahearn, who was a consumer marketing manager at AT&T in September 1987. The inspiration for the term came from the ease at which a competitor could switch a customer's service away from AT&T by falsely notifying a telephone company that an AT&T customer had elected to switch to their service. This process gave AT&T's competitors a "slam dunk" method for the unauthorized switching of a customer's long-distance service. The term slamming became an industry standard term for this practice.
An incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) is a local telephone company which held the regional monopoly on landline service before the market was opened to competitive local exchange carriers, or the corporate successor of such a firm.
Phone fraud, or more generally communications fraud, is the use of telecommunications products or services with the intention of illegally acquiring money from, or failing to pay, a telecommunication company or its customers.
Bell MTS Inc. is a subsidiary of BCE Inc. that operates telecommunications services in the Canadian province of Manitoba. The company's head office is located in MTS Place at 333 Main Street, in Downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Cincinnati Bell is a regional telecommunications service provider based in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. It provides landline telephone, fiber-optic Internet, and IPTV services through its subsidiaries Cincinnati Bell Telephone and Hawaiian Telcom, which are the incumbent local exchange carriers for the Cincinnati and Dayton metropolitan areas and Hawaii. Other subsidiaries provide enterprise information technology services and long distance calling.
In telecommunications, a long-distance call (U.S.) or trunk call is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are typically charged a higher billing rate than local calls. The term is not necessarily synonymous with placing calls to another telephone area code.
Allstream is a business communications provider based in Toronto, Ontario that provides IP connectivity, managed IP services, unified communications and voice services through its 30,000 km national fiber network. The company's headquarters are currently located at 5160 Orbitor Drive in Mississauga, Ontario.
In telecommunications a point of interface (POI) is used to show the physical interface between two different carriers, such as a local exchange carrier (LEC) and a wireless carrier, or an LEC and an IntereXchange Carrier (IXC). This demarcation point often defines responsibility as well as serving as a point for testing. In many cases, a POI exists as a point of demarcation ("DEMARC") within an LEC building, and is established under "co-location" agreements. A long distance, wireless, or competitive local carrier "rents" space at the local telephone location.
Automatic message accounting (AMA) provides detailed accounting for telephone calls. When direct distance dialing (DDD) was introduced in the US, message registers no longer sufficed for dialed telephone calls. The need to record the time and phone number of each long-distance call was met by electromechanical data processing equipment.
An independent telephone company was a telephone company providing local service in the United States or Canada that was not part of the Bell System organized by American Telephone and Telegraph. Independent telephone companies usually operated in many rural or sparsely populated areas.
The Bell System was the system of companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by AT&T, which dominated the telephone services industry in North America for 100 years from its creation in 1877 until its demise in the early 1980s. The system of companies was often colloquially called Ma Bell, as it held a near-complete monopoly over telephone service in most areas of the United States and Canada. At the time of its breakup in the early 1980s, the Bell System had assets of $150 billion and employed over one million people.
Cramming is a form of fraud in which small charges are added to a bill by a third party without the subscriber's consent, approval, authorization or disclosure. These may be disguised as a tax, some other common fee or a bogus service, and may be several dollars or even just a few cents. The crammer's intent is that the subscriber will overlook and ultimately pay these small charges without them knowing what it's all about.
In the United States of America, Canada, and other countries participating in the North American Numbering Plan, a toll-free telephone number has one of the area codes 800, 833, 844, 855, 866, 877, and 888.
A PSTN network topology is the switching network topology of a telephone network connected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN).