Do many people still pay long-distance charges? For many years we've had plans with "free" nationwide calling. For a while when kids were in school out of state we had a WATS line so they could fall us free. I cancelled it later because I was getting too many calls from Puerto Rico where the callers couldn' speak English.
In the UK there are various deals which include calls on landlines and mobiles but there are local and long distance changes if you don't make use of them, at least on landlines. The deals don't (generally) cover international calls. 'Roaming' is now included on mobiles, at least in the EU, although many companies off packages which include other countries. The exact rules etc vary from company to company.
Gene Wirchenko wrote on 12/23/2017 8:08 AM:
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.
In '84 we were on a train to new york from Stamford and the conductor pinned our accent as Paisley area...turned out he used to conduct on the bus between paisley and johnstone before he emigrated ....
In the 1980's I knew 2 brothers that lived next to each other. The houses were seperated by a small field maybe 100 yards wide. They were long distance from each other by the phone companies. Each one had a different phone company.
Where I am at now I can not get ATT as its service starts about 1/4 of a mile or less from me. I am on another phone company, or was before I switched over to the internet phone. That was a very good thing for me. I get free long distance, but best of all they block most robot calls. The phone rings once and quits. The number is on the caller ID box and if it really is something I want, I can dial them back. Also it is easy to go on the internet and tell the phone company I want to block a number. I don't do it, but a friend does, you can have the home phone number send it to your cell phone after a few rings.
The phone company better get some incentive. They are probably loosing lots due to the cell phones and now to the internet phones. Neither of them seem to charge extra for what is usually a long distance call. The phone bill was about $ 20 but taxes and LD connect and other fees made it around $ 40 per month. If you add caller ID and a few other things , it will cost even more. Most of that is 'free' with the $ 30 internet phone I am now using.
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.
Our electric is like this. Most of our development is National Grid and our street and one other are NYSEG. Some times this is good, but sometimes we're out and the other streets aren't.
The "phone company" is usually also the ISP in the modern world. I don't think they really care that much about land-line calls anymore.
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.
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).
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.
I think I understand how they work. It is they better change the way they work while there are still some that will use the land lines. If people can get good service via the internet phone or just the cell phones, why would they even want a land line at a price much higher than the internet phone ?
The phone companies have been around for many years and have a mind set. If they do not change it, they will be out of business. Some are trying to get into the internet business. In a town near me the town put in fiber optic cable trying to make money. The local cable company boosted the rates of down load speed to keep the people on them. Not too long ago the lowest speed was 25, then went to 100, and is now at 200. I am getting about 230 on most speed tests now. Not that that much speed is needed in many cases, but it sure beats the DSL from the phone companies also.
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.
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.
That has happened to so many companies - Tweeter, Circuit City, Radio Shack... it almost happened to Best Buy and could still happen to old chains like J.C. Pennys, Sears and K-Mart.
Companies which don't keep up with the rest of the world fail eventually.
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.
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 :)
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.
They don't care if you have service or not. There will always be companies with many hard lines to pay their bills.
Ain't gonna happen.
230 what? 230 Mbps would be insanely fast and 230 kbps is insanely slow. I have around 7 Mbps peak and I'm happy with that. I can watch movies all day long and do anything I need. It's been a while since I've tried to download the GB of so it takes for the latest copy of FPGA development tools.
Unless they are public utilities with a profit guaranteed by the public service commission.
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