At 10/4/2010 03:31 PM, Roger Howard wrote: >What do you do when you ask for a quote for bandwidth, and the person >asks what you are paying right now. Do you tell them, and if you do, >won't they just undercut it by a little just to get your business? >Seems like a strange way of doing business to ask what you're paying >for something before giving you a quote.
This reminds me of a scam ran in the past decade by a company called Norvergence. They sold phone and Internet service out of a boiler room in beautiful downtown Newark, NJ. The boiler room got their salesbozos into the door, where they promised to sell you service at a rate equal to on a discount on your current bills, I think 20%. So they demanded your current bills in order to do a quote. Then they got their marks to sign a 5-year contract! To make it look convincing, they had Adtran sell them a private-labeled IAD, which they pretended did all sorts of magic. In many cases it was not even in line; they were just reselling, or muxing, a costly T1. The scam was that they wrote up the 5-year contract as a lease on the magic box. and turned around and got banks to finance the lease, giving the cash out to Norvergence up front. But the box was really worth <$2k, and so Norvergence was essentially taking the banks for the anticipated 5-year cash flow. The principals were then pocketing the money... until the whole pyramid collapsed. The banks tried to sue the marks for the remaining "lease" payments but I think eventually got stopped. Moral: Honest salesbozos don't need to know your real costs. -- Fred Goldstein k1io fgoldstein "at" ionary.com ionary Consulting http://www.ionary.com/ +1 617 795 2701 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
