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#32
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Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
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 !!! That is sort of analogous to speaking dialects !!! :-) I always thought that that nonsense could have been solved by using a better zone system. A call to the same zone or only one zone away would be local; the others would be long distance. Set the zones to allow for cities and geography. 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. I have a place in a very rural area and when I first bought it computers used dial up. 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. Otherwise it would have been a non-long distance toll call. For many others on the other side of the lake it was a toll call. It's still that way some 30 years later. TPC has no incentive to increase the non-toll region even though it costs them nothing in equipment which was upgraded decades ago. They just have to change their billing. You still pay for long distance? We've had unlimited (domestic) long distance on our land lines for years. 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. I have a land line still but have no long distance. I pay $15 a month which is basically to keep the business number until I decide to do something with it like VOIP. I was looking at Google Voice the other day but I digress... You are most likely paying some $30 or $40 a month to get your "unlimited" long distance. 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. Now long distance is so cheap they practically give it away. -- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998 |
#33
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Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
In article ,
says... Do you mind if I ask which VOIP company you're using (reply by email if you wish). I'm considering switching both my home and business numbers to another company. Verizon has gone VOIP but they're expensive (and have fewer features). The company is/was Time Warner Cable that was bought or merged with Spectrum. I only had the internet before the merge and it was about $ 60 and the land line phone with another company was about $ 40 or $ 45 or just the basic service. No caller ID and 10 cents a minuit for long distance. By bundling the internet and phone I am paying about $ 69 per month for both services and that includes a surcharge for the wifi modem and probably because I wanted to keep Earthlink as the ISP instead of going with them which I think is Roadrunner. https://www.spectrum.com/home-phone.html They advertise $ 29.99 each for some cable TV, phone , and internet if you bundle them together. There is no contract or anyting. Not sure how long they will hold that price as it has only been a few months. Did not want the TV as using Direct TV and the wife wanted to keep it. Only drawback I can think of now is if the cable line goes out I have to use a cell phone to call them. |
#34
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Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
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. -- ================== Remove the "x" from my email address Jerry, AI0K ================== |
#35
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Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
On 12/23/2017 10:41 PM, Ralph Mowery wrote:
In article , says... Do you mind if I ask which VOIP company you're using (reply by email if you wish). I'm considering switching both my home and business numbers to another company. Verizon has gone VOIP but they're expensive (and have fewer features). The company is/was Time Warner Cable that was bought or merged with Spectrum. I only had the internet before the merge and it was about $ 60 and the land line phone with another company was about $ 40 or $ 45 or just the basic service. No caller ID and 10 cents a minuit for long distance. By bundling the internet and phone I am paying about $ 69 per month for both services and that includes a surcharge for the wifi modem and probably because I wanted to keep Earthlink as the ISP instead of going with them which I think is Roadrunner. https://www.spectrum.com/home-phone.html They advertise $ 29.99 each for some cable TV, phone , and internet if you bundle them together. There is no contract or anyting. Not sure how long they will hold that price as it has only been a few months. Did not want the TV as using Direct TV and the wife wanted to keep it. Only drawback I can think of now is if the cable line goes out I have to use a cell phone to call them. Ah, OK. I thought you had gone with one of the VOIP companies. We don't have Spectrum here; there are some places on the other side of the river in Virginia with them, but all we have available are Verizon and XFinity. I think Verizon is the lesser of the two evils -- ================== Remove the "x" from my email address Jerry, AI0K ================== |
#36
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phone prices, was Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
In article , rickman wrote:
You seem to fail to understand how "the phone company" operates. They have capital investment. A regulatory board allows them a certain profit based on that capital investment. If they make too little profit they can request rate changes of the regulatory board. TPC doesn't lose money. That was called rate of return regulation. In the US, only little rural telcos still do that. Big phone companies have negotiated price caps instead, which give them a new incentive to invest as little as possible in the regulated network. For the most part, mobile phone rates aren't regulated at all. -- Regards, John Levine, , Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly |
#37
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phone prices, was Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
John Levine wrote on 12/23/2017 11:15 PM:
In article , rickman wrote: You seem to fail to understand how "the phone company" operates. They have capital investment. A regulatory board allows them a certain profit based on that capital investment. If they make too little profit they can request rate changes of the regulatory board. TPC doesn't lose money. That was called rate of return regulation. In the US, only little rural telcos still do that. Big phone companies have negotiated price caps instead, which give them a new incentive to invest as little as possible in the regulated network. For the most part, mobile phone rates aren't regulated at all. You are confused. The cell phone companies are in a different business. Verizon may own a public telephone company, but most of the US has public phone companies owned by someone else. The phone companies providing landline phone service are still regulated entities regardless of who owns what. -- Rick C Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, on the centerline of totality since 1998 |
#38
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Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
On Sat, 23 Dec 2017 23:10:44 -0500, Jerry Stuckle
wrote: On 12/23/2017 10:41 PM, Ralph Mowery wrote: In article , says... Do you mind if I ask which VOIP company you're using (reply by email if you wish). I'm considering switching both my home and business numbers to another company. Verizon has gone VOIP but they're expensive (and have fewer features). The company is/was Time Warner Cable that was bought or merged with Spectrum. I only had the internet before the merge and it was about $ 60 and the land line phone with another company was about $ 40 or $ 45 or just the basic service. No caller ID and 10 cents a minuit for long distance. By bundling the internet and phone I am paying about $ 69 per month for both services and that includes a surcharge for the wifi modem and probably because I wanted to keep Earthlink as the ISP instead of going with them which I think is Roadrunner. https://www.spectrum.com/home-phone.html They advertise $ 29.99 each for some cable TV, phone , and internet if you bundle them together. There is no contract or anyting. Not sure how long they will hold that price as it has only been a few months. Did not want the TV as using Direct TV and the wife wanted to keep it. Only drawback I can think of now is if the cable line goes out I have to use a cell phone to call them. Ah, OK. I thought you had gone with one of the VOIP companies. We don't have Spectrum here; there are some places on the other side of the river in Virginia with them, but all we have available are Verizon and XFinity. I think Verizon is the lesser of the two evils You know nothing compels you to get your phone from your internet provider. Microsoft provides unlimited worldwide service for $14.99/month, plus $25 every three if you want a number that people can call. Google has something similar. |
#39
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phone prices, was Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
That was called rate of return regulation. In the US, only little
rural telcos still do that. Big phone companies have negotiated price caps instead, which give them a new incentive to invest as little as possible in the regulated network. For the most part, mobile phone rates aren't regulated at all. You are confused. The cell phone companies are in a different business. Verizon may own a public telephone company, but most of the US has public phone companies owned by someone else. The phone companies providing landline phone service are still regulated entities regardless of who owns what. Yes, they're regulated, but most of them are under price caps, not rate of return. So long as they don't exceed the price caps, the regulators don't care what their capital investment or profit is. -- Regards, John Levine, , Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly |
#40
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Pepper and Salt! (Condiments of the season) :-)
On Sat, 23 Dec 2017 23:49:05 -0500
J. Clarke wrote: You know nothing compels you to get your phone from your internet provider. Microsoft provides unlimited worldwide service for $14.99/month, plus $25 every three if you want a number that people can call. Google has something similar. That is an expensive option unless you make a *lot* of calls, there are providers where you pay for all calls but the rate to most places is under a cent per minute. -- Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays C:\WIN | A better way to focus the sun The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/ |
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