Beehive Telephone, which provides phone service to remote communities in Utah and Nevada, was sued Friday in U.S. District Court for nonpayment of more than $48,000 in bills and interest.
But Art Brothers, Wendover, the company's owner, insists that the other side of the story is that Beehive should not have to pay to use its own 800 numbers.The suit was filed by Database Service Management Inc., a New Jersey Company owned by Bell Communications Research Inc. Bell Communications is a Delaware corporation jointly owned by the eight regional "Baby Bell" companies, called the Bell-operating companies. They include US WEST.
The Bell-operating companies jointly offered for sale a service called the "800 Service Management System," under a Federal Communications Commission tariff, the suit says. This is a computer-based system that manages the assignment and use of toll-free, 800-prefix numbers.
According to the suit, the system allows 800 numbers to be portable among various telephone systems.
"Beehive reserved approximately 10,000 `800' numbers in the . . . data base," the suit says. The Utah company had access to the service, but "has failed to pay when due the service charges and late payment/interest charges."
Not counting interest, from Nov. 15, 1994, until Database suspended Beehive's access on Nov. 26, 1994, the company owed $42,533, according to the suit. Since then, more than $6,000 has been added in interest claims.
The suit seeks a court order that Beehive pay $48,879, plus any further interest and court fees.
Brothers told the Deseret News that Beehive itself has a formal action pending against the Bell-operating companies on the dispute.
Brothers said that years ago, Beehive was assigned its 10,000 "800" numbers by Bellcore, a research branch of the Bell-operating companies.
"We then went ahead and spent a ton of money for a data base to translate these numbers for northern Utah and Nevada," Beehive's service area. The company made sure that when the numbers were used, calls would be sent to Beehive.
"We then looked up in the computer where the calls would be routed to, and completed the calls," he said.
The FCC allowed the Bell-operating companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build massive data bases and computer systems that use the 800 numbers. Then companies with 800 numbers assigned were "supposed to take their numbers and put them in that data base," Brothers added.
"So, we cooperated and spent a few thousand bucks and transferred all our data base into their data base. And I went to several meetings on this back in Washington to coordinate" Beehive's part of the project.
Next, he said, the FCC staff decided to allow Bellcore to charge for use of the data base, he said. As far as Beehive's numbers were concerned, that part of the data base was built by the Utah company itself.
"We said, `Wait a minute, we're still using our data base,' " he said. He objected to paying the steep charges the Bell companies wanted to charge for Beehive to use its own numbers.
Originally, the managers of the central data base intended to charge for information only when consulted by the local users, like Beehive. But then they decided to charge a flat 78 cents per month for every number in its data base.
"We thought that was not proper," Brothers said.
"I was willing to go along with the original deal, that every time we dialed a number we paid a fee."
He charged that the rule was implemented by the FCC staff without proper hearings, notice or due process.
"So all of a sudden, Bellcore started sending me bills a couple of years ago for several thousand dollars a month, for our 800 numbers sitting in their data base."
Later, he said, Bellcore sold the system to Database Management. Meanwhile, Beehive has a legal action challenging the charges.