Getting rid of the regulation altogether seems like tossing out the baby with the bathwater. It seems like it would be possible to correct by removing the loophole of routing calls through a rural region that are not terminating at a resident of that actual region. I don't understand telephony enough to know whether that's a simple thing to detect or not, though.
How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#42Interesting, I dint know that. I had an interesting experience with ATT. I was into the 6 month of a 2year contract back in 2007. I wasn't using my phone much (non-iphone). But then I went on a road trip to Yellowstone, which included driving through ND, SD, MT and WY. During this 7 day trip, I was using my phone a lot (work + personal). The total amount of minutes I spent in those 7 days were way more than my usual…
FWIW - AT&T is now in SD. (grew up there, and still have family in the state).
And in Montana as well when they purchased Alltel in 2009.
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#43A similar thing happened in New Zealand (and likely elsewhere) in the late 90's, before broadband became prevalent. There were a number of ISP's who provided free dial-up internet, because they made money from termination fees when the majority of people called from a large telco to their smaller one. Eventually the large telco reached a commercial agreement and the service was scrapped, but it was good while it last…
Same thing in Ireland, except that we paid for the calls. So we paid 2c per minute, of which the ISP maybe 1c got from the telco in termination fees, so there was a lot of "free" internet access at the time.
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#44Getting rid of the regulation altogether seems like tossing out the baby with the bathwater. It seems like it would be possible to correct by removing the loophole of routing calls through a rural region that are not terminating at a resident of that actual region. I don't understand telephony enough to know whether that's a simple thing to detect or not, though.
It's not a simple thing to detect. Short of broad-scale wiretapping, if I bridge two calls on my office phone nobody will know except my in-house PBX. The telco sees two simultaneous calls into my PBX, but unless they are actively listening in on both lines, they can only guess whether these two callers are also talking to each other.
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#45This type of scam is big business in rural Iowa (and I'm sure other areas).
I used to work in rural northwest Iowa. We had a "programmer" (to use it loosely) quit to work for a company who's sole purpose was to abuse this system.
They ran a "phone company" in a small town and then connected a big asterisk box at their local exchange to accept free conference calls. They then installed smaller asterisk boxes in other businesses that were a long-distance call away with for the sole purpose of keeping the lines coming into their conference box 95% full 24x7 with bogus calls from 5-45 minutes long.
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#46This seems like a good example of SEO-driven linkbait. It's not quite spam -- the story is interesting, if not exactly breaking news -- but I'm pretty sure the main goal is to get inbound links to feefighters.com
I agree with the [current] 4 replies, but why-o-why is eli downvoted for this opinion? It's not spam/troll, it's not badly put, it's not a priori based on a falsehood.
Do not downvote for mere disagreement. /grrrr
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#47Reminds me of a very similar story from Austria.
Back story: Austria is one of the most competitive countries as far as mobile phone plans go. There were three big companies, A1 (previously state-owned, a bit similar to AT&T), One (now Orange, owned by French Telecom) and Max (now T-Mobile, owned by German Telecom). In 2003 a new company, Hutchinson 3 (branded as "Drei") emerged. Backed by (for a small country like Austria) seemingly unlimited money from Hutchison Whampoa they built a completely new network (again: Austria is pretty small). They only cared about getting customers and started a price dumping war with the other three players.
In 2007 Hutchison 3G introduced a new kind of mobile plan called Sixback. Because of the - in their opinion - high termination fees they offered 6 (Euro-)cents per minute on incoming calls from the three other providers. In Europe you don't pay for incoming calls like you do in America, but getting paid for incoming calls was new. The plan became quite popular, there have been reports of peoply having over two dozen SIM cards from other providers just so they could "load" their Sixback plan using the free minutes from the other plans and then transferring the money via a 0900 number. (0900 is the area code for phone sex and similar numbers where you pay a lot of money per minute and the receiver of the call receives most of that money).
Of course the other providers hated Hutchison 3 for that plan, but that quickly turned around when the regulation body lowered the termination fee, so that every Sixback call now loses money for Hutchison 3. They don't offer that plan anymore, but there are lots of customers who still have that plan and obviously refuse to be switched to a newer plan.
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
So a government acts socialist, distorts the market, causes damage, and you think this is an argument for more socialism? All starting from the unwarranted assumption that telephone access was necessary to farmers and food prices would have risen dramatically.
"All starting from the unwarranted assumption that telephone access was necessary to farmers and food prices would have risen dramatically." Yeah, that initial assumption really is weird. How much could a phone line like that possibly cost for a company who does phone lines? I have no idea, maybe 10 million for all I know. But that's a one-time cost that will be spread out over all the crops that farm produces for th…
Some googling around gets me a cost of $120,000/mile to install overhead telephone wire. So, for example, if you have a tiny town of 200 people that's 15 miles away from anywhere, running a phone line out to it will cost $9,000 per resident. Which sounds steep, but possible to self-fund.
On the other hand, if you have one guy on a farm two miles away from the next nearest neighbor, well, adding a phone line costs as much as building a second house.
The interesting question for society is, should these people have phone lines? And if they should, how much of the cost should they bear themselves? And how far should we be willing to go to run phone out to increasingly remote areas?
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#49This seems like a good example of SEO-driven linkbait. It's not quite spam -- the story is interesting, if not exactly breaking news -- but I'm pretty sure the main goal is to get inbound links to feefighters.com
I agree with the [current] 4 replies, but why-o-why is eli downvoted for this opinion? It's not spam/troll, it's not badly put, it's not a priori based on a falsehood. Do not downvote for mere disagreement. /grrrr
Eli is not adding anything to the discussion. S/he is not disputing the content of the article; just the motive. Are we going to have an SEO discussion about every article that makes it to the frontpage?
Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?
#50I once read that this is how MagicJack makes most of their money as well.
It's interesting that you bring you MagicJack. I have always wondered how they made money. Now it is starting to make some sense.
Can you share the link to that article?