Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

feefighters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 80 posts

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#71

Post by bigiain »

Dove wrote: post #48
burgerbrain wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

"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?"

Phone lines, or roads, or fire brigades, or police. Or tax collectors…

I suspect most farmers would choose to fund their own telecommunication, if it meant they didn't have to pay tax.

I'm not quite sure where the line gets drawn about what's reasonable to "expect" the government to provide in return for your tax dollars, and quite how to ensure "fairness" or equality between city-dwellers and rural taxpayers. But deep down I'm a bit of a socialist - I think phones should probably be owned by "the government", or at least regulated so heavily that the decisions about who does and doesn't get phone service is largely driven by ethics and "the greater good" than by "increasing shareholder value".

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#72

Post by kemiller »

Dove wrote: post #48
burgerbrain wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

This conversation goes rather differently in the age of the mobile phone.

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#73

Post by bigiain »

andylei wrote: post #25
jballanc wrote: post #16

Bear with me here, but it seems to me like this is a good argument for socialism. Consider: why do termination fees exist? Clearly, as America was being wired with telephone service, the cost to run lines to rural areas was prohibitively expensive. So what's the capitalist/Randian thing to do? Well, charge more for phone service out there. If people can't afford it, then they'll move to where it is cheaper to have a…

> there's obviously a really big incentive to the government and everyone that's not living in rural areas to not have the cost of food increase > would've just had the government pay to install rural phone lines you didn't decrease the price of food. you may have decreased the cost paid out of pocket by the consumer, but you haven't changed the actual cost of producing food. if the cost of those phone lines was $100…

"this socialist scheme never really changed anything, except it distorted the visible prices so that they do not match real costs. now all you've done is made it harder for the market to optimally allocate limited resources."

Unfortunately, "the market" is only going to optimize for the metrics used to evaluate it. When those metrics are almost exclusively "profit" and "shareholder value", the market optimizations aren't always going to align with "societies expectations". Without external pressure, "the market" will optimize for Haliburton being in control of military budgets, investment banking being in control of police departments, and farmers having no phone access.

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#74

Post by bigiain »

kemiller wrote: post #72
Dove wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This conversation goes rather differently in the age of the mobile phone.

But rears it's head again as soon as you start talking about broadband internet access…

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#75

Post by mcantor »

eli wrote: post #67
ajays wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can respect not wanting to have constant meta-discussions about each submission, but I think SEO is an interesting topic in its own right. Especially the sneaky-but-still-white-hat type. I'm not even sure there's necessarily anything wrong with it; it's ultimately based on creating content that people want to read. (I didn't flag this article, for example. It's an interesting story.) But I think it's worthwhile to…

How do you know...?

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#77

Post by kruipen »

pg wrote: post #64
eli wrote: post #2

This 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'm surprised you got downvoted so much. I thought that too.

How is that different than this http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/16013457968/the-fixie-bike... (for which your are credited BTW)?

It's a par for the course for a startup blog.

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#78

Post by chronomex »

kemiller wrote: post #72
Dove wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This conversation goes rather differently in the age of the mobile phone.

Mobile phone base stations aren't free either.

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#79

Post by jakejake »

pak wrote: post #44
jakejake wrote: post #41

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.

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.

I suspected it might be something like that. Thanks for clarifying.

Re: How Can A Free Conference Call Be Free?

#80

Post by kemiller »

chronomex wrote: post #78
kemiller wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This conversation goes rather differently in the age of the mobile phone.

Mobile phone base stations aren't free either.

Certainly they are not. But you have more deployment options, and while 15 miles of phone line run to a single customer benefits only the customer (and, I suppose, everyone else who might want to reach them) a single cell tower has potential benefits to the entire subscriber base.
Post reply on HN