By MARIE LITALIEN
Be prepared for a new fee on your next Bell telephone bill, and on every one for the next three years.
Now that the local calling area for the City of Greater Sudbury has been expanded, Bell land-line residents will pay an extra 34 cents monthly for residential lines and 38 cents monthly for business lines. In the end, this will amount to $12.24 for residential lines and $13.68 for business lines.
Although this is good news for many businesses and residents who frequently call Greater Sudbury areas and had to pay long-distance, residents in the city of Sudbury, who already had these services, will also have to pay the surcharge.
The surcharge must be paid no matter what, said Doug Nadorozny, general manager of Growth and Development with the City of Greater Sudbury.
For Sudbury resident Serge Gosselin, systems administrator at B&D Manufacturing, this extra charge is a small price to pay even though he will not be receiving any extra service.
“The bottom line is simple,” said Gosselin. “We’re supposed to be one big happy family,” he said about Sudbury and the outlying areas.
The surcharge was approved by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) so that the telephone company and its competitors can recover lost revenues that came from the expansion. The CRTC only requires the surcharge be voted on by residential customers if it amounts to more than one dollar per month.
More information should have been made available about the local calling area expansion, said Gosselin. The city should use available resources to inform citizens when changes like these occur, he said. “About 60 to 65 percent of my staff had no clue about the local calling area expansion,” he continued.
The local calling area expansion means residents can call anywhere within the City of Greater Sudbury with no long-distance fees. For example, a Garson caller can phone Azilda without being charged.
The expanded area includes all of the City of Greater Sudbury, parts of the Municipality of Markstay-Warren, the Township of Nairn and Hyman, and the Wahnapitae and Whitefish Lake First Nations.
People living outside of Greater Sudbury will not be affected unless they are in an extended area.
For some residents, especially in the city of Sudbury, calls could be placed past the outlying areas without incurring long distances fees. For example, residents in Sudbury could call St. Charles and not be charged. This will not be changed, but customers in the new expanded area, who could not call these areas long-distance free before, will not gain this service. “In order for it to work for everyone (calling for free to areas such as St. Charles) everything in-between would have to be a part of the local calling area,” said Nadorozny.
Residents are being advised to re-program their communications equipment by removing the “1” from programmed numbers that used to be long-distance, especially for security systems. This may also be required for fax machines, speed-dialing and automatic dialers. Phone numbers, area codes and Bell Mobility customers will be unaffected by the expansion.
Click here to view map in PDF format.
For more information, or expansion on subjects found in this article, visit www.greatersudbury.ca/localcalling or www.bell.ca/elca.
