What the heck is the Information Superhighway anyway?

It can't be the pig-slow Internet connection we get with dial-up modems. That might be a scenic country lane on a good day, or a crowded back alley on a bad one. The InfoBahn promises, unrealistic to begin with, have largely been forgotten in the amazing growth of the Internet.

Vice President Gore, the telephone companies and a coterie of publicists promised 500 channels of interactive tv, combined with a shiny new fiber-optic phone network that would deliver the glories of the information age cheaply and ubiquitously. It turned out nobody cared about 500 tv channels, interactive or otherwise, given that there wasn't much worth watching on the mess of channels we already have.

We were going to have competition in every aspect of phone service, with costs going down and quality of service going up. High-speed Internet connections, via ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and other whiz-bang technologies were to carry us to a new frontier of interconnection. Ameritech does, finally, offer ISDN service to individuals, if one can figure out how to order it and make it work. They're also testing DSL, though I didn't manage to convince them to let me be a tester, so I don't know how it's going.

And I still don't understand my telephone bill. According to Bruce Kushnick, almost no one does.

Kushnick is a telecommunications analyst who is very angry with the RBOCs (regional Bell operating companies). In 1992 his attention was caught by a 37-cent charge on his phone bill, for a call from his New York office to a nearby town. Having just completed a large study for a long distance company, Kushnick knew the cost for a call to the West Coast was only 21 cents, and was disturbed. He started examining phone bills of friends and relatives, and found that none of them could read or understand their bills.

The last straw may have been when he found that from 1982 to 1996 his 87-year old, legally blind aunt had paid $1100 to her local phone company in rent for one rotary phone. She had also paid over $625 in fees for "wire maintenance," a service she had never ordered, didn't understand, and for which she had never received anything.

As of 1993, according to Kushnick, over 25 pct of the elderly were still paying rent on their phones, and almost half of all U.S. households that are paying wire maintenance fees never ordered it. Calculating that the phone companies nationwide were overcharging billions of dollars, and that his work as a consultant to those companies helped in their fleecing, Kushnick decided to quit his job and fight the system.

The most concrete result of his campaign against the telecommunications establishment was that his phone service was mysteriously disconnected. Now Kushnick has written a book, The Unauthorized Biography of the Baby Bells, though he's having a tough time getting it published. Do you understand your phone bill? Are you prepared to pay higher Internet rates because the phone companies want to collect new fees from your Internet service provider?

Take a trip to Bruce Kushnick's Web site, and decide for yourself if he's a crank. Or if the phone companies have been cranking you.

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