Text 25745, 54 rader
Skriven 2006-02-20 11:34:00 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
  Kommentar till text 25734 av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: This echo...
====================
 >> Doesn't matter if the call takes 10 seconds, the minimum
 >> charge is one minute.

 MVDV>> Greedy bastards...

 >   They are the telephone company.  What else can be said?

Imdeed...

 > I used to say the same thing about the European telephone providers
 > who charged by the minute for local calls.

I do not know about all the other European countries, but here in The
Netherlands calls were never charged by the minute. Up until 1995 or so they
were charged by the "tick". This was a signal that drove an electromagntical
counter in the exchange. The signal was also available at the subscriber's end.
For payphones it made the coin drop and for other subscribers it would allow
them to monitor the cost if they rented a counter from the telco. The "tick"
signal advanced the counter and produced an audiable tick.

A local call was one tick irrespective of duration until 1985 or so. For long
distance and international calls the interval bewteen ticks varied from once
every ten minutes for "near local" calls to once every two seconds for the more
exotic international calls.

 > Here, local calls are not metered -- at least on most plans.

That does not mean you don't pay for them. It is in the monthly fee, which in
the US is higher than over here.

As for metered local calls here: it is *us* - the modem community - that is
partly to blame for that.

You see with the old mechanical exchanges, there was a limit to the number of
subscribers that could simutaneously make a call. Normally there were seven so
called "first group selectors" for each block of 100 subscribers. When a
subscribers took the horn off the hook, he seized a frist group selector and
got dial tone.

So when seven out of the same block of hundred subscribers were off hook, the
eight's would not get a dial tone any more.

This was not a problem. Until the advent of BBS's that is. Now all of a sudden
there were subscribers who did not just make local calls that perhaps lasted a
few minutes or maybe half an hour in exceptional cases, but these guys stayed
on line four hours and hours and hours..

So they started metering local calls as well to give the modem community an
incentive to develop off line readers.

Cheers, Michiel

--- Buy Danish
 * Origin: http://www.vlist.org (2:280/5555)