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? 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.

--
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Jerry Stuckle

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