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