On 12/23/2017 10:25 PM, rickman wrote:
Jerry Stuckle wrote on 12/23/2017 9:10 PM:
On 12/23/2017 2:06 PM, rickman wrote:
Gene Wirchenko wrote on 12/23/2017 8:08 AM:
On Fri, 22 Dec 2017 15:39:08 -0600, Charles Richmond
wrote:

[snip]

Back in the bad old days, two houses on different sides of the same
freeway... a phone call from one house to the other... was a
long-distant toll call !!!Â* That is sort of analogous to speaking
dialects !!!Â* :-)

Â*Â*Â*Â* I always thought that that nonsense could have been solved by
using a better zone system.Â* A call to the same zone or only one zone
away would be local; the others would be long distance.Â* Set the zones
to allow for cities and geography.

Â*Â*Â*Â* Would this have been workable?

The phone company has no incentive to make this work better for users.
Their profits are regulated and they have no competition.Â* I have a
place
in a very rural area and when I first bought it computers used dial
up.Â* I
got very lucky and there was a local exchange that was not quite as
local
as the others so I could reach a provider.Â* Otherwise it would have
been a
non-long distance toll call.Â* For many others on the other side of the
lake it was a toll call.Â* It's still that way some 30 years later.Â* TPC
has no incentive to increase the non-toll region even though it costs
them
nothing in equipment which was upgraded decades ago.Â* They just have to
change their billing.


You still pay for long distance?Â* We've had unlimited (domestic) long
distance on our land lines for years.Â* And that was long before
Verizon had
competition.

Now they've changed us to fiber - no more POTS line; rather it's VOIP.
Works
fine (better than the old copper) but the battery dies after about 5-8
hours
of power outage, depending on how much we use it.

If you have "unlimited" long distance, you are paying for it.Â* I have a
land line still but have no long distance.Â* I pay $15 a month which is
basically to keep the business number until I decide to do something
with it like VOIP.Â* I was looking at Google Voice the other day but I
digress...Â* You are most likely paying some $30 or $40 a month to get
your "unlimited" long distance.Â* A service that comes with my cell where
voice calls are unmetered.

Funny, it was the over charging for long distance that prompted
competition in the market and led to the breakup of Bell Telephone.Â* Now
long distance is so cheap they practically give it away.


Not significantly. It's running less than $60 for two lines. But that
is actually less then when we had POTS lines and were paying for long
distance. But I think it's still too expensive.

My business lines are still POTS and much more expensive (as you would
expect) - but they also don't have unlimited long distance. But Verizon
is going to force me to go VOIP on those lines, soon, also.

The difference is the copper in our neighborhood is over 50 years old
and having a lot of problems. Rather than replace the cable, Verizon
installed fiber and now they run everything - phone, tv and internet -
over the one fiber instead of twisted pairs and multiple coaxes.

Plus we have more TV channels available than we had with coax.

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Jerry, AI0K

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