Hawtel makes its case for by-the-call billing

Every Sunday, "Back in the Day" looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.

It is not true that senior citizens make more than the average number of telephone calls.

So at least 60 percent of them would be among the 230,000 Oahu telephone users who would benefit by being billed by the call.

And by-the-call billing would add only $1 a month to any firm’s bill which allowed an employee to make personal calls which totaled an hour.

Duane Johnson, Hawaiian Telephone Co.’s vice president for revenue, gave the estimates yesterday as the Public Utilities Commission began a hearing on the utility’s request to charge subscribers by the length and number of local calls they make instead of charging flat rates.

HawTel wants to charge both residential and business subscribers 2 cents to make a call and 1 cent for each minute of talking between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. At other times, the charges would be 1 cent and 0.5 cents, respectively.

In addition, residental subscribers would pay a monthly fee of $5.40, thus making the minimum by-the-call bill $6, which is $5.40 less than the present $11/40 monthly flat rate which allows unlimited local calling.

There were some objections to the by-the-call proposal at public hearings held last spring throughout the state.

Johnson also said that a woman who complained at a hearing that her bill would "go through the roof" if she were charged by the call since she makes 80 calls a month as a volunteer for the Kokua Council for Senior Citizens was wrong.

He said, "Even if she continues to make the same number of calls, her by-the-call bill would be less than her present flat rate bill."

The commission’s three members didn’t argue with Johnson about those assertions but were skeptical of his contention that HawTel had made up its own mind about wanting to put into effect by-the-call billing.

Johnson acknowledged that HawTel’s parent company — the Mainland-based General Telephone and Electronics — now says "as policy" that 90 percent of GTE’s affiliate companies should have switched from flat rate to by-the-call billing by 1990.