North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: New N.Y. Law Targets Hidden Net LD Tolls
> -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Robert Bonomi > Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2005 7:43 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: New N.Y. Law Targets Hidden Net LD Tolls > > > > From [email protected] Thu Aug 18 01:47:56 2005 > > Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 02:44:59 -0400 > > From: "Eric A. Hall" <[email protected]> > > Cc: [email protected] > > Subject: Re: New N.Y. Law Targets Hidden Net LD Tolls > > > > > > > > On 8/17/2005 10:04 PM, Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote: > > > > > A new law that's apparently the first in the nation threatens to > > > penalize Internet service providers that fail to warn > users that some > > > dial-up numbers can ring up enormous long-distance phone > bills even > > > though they appear local. > > > > aka, make ISPs liable for other people's fraud. What's the > thinking here, > > anybody know? > > *NOT* "other people's fraud". Just when you have > 'intra-LATA' toll charges > for some numbers within a single area-code. If the user is > on one side of > the area-code, and the provider's POP is on the far side of > it, you can have > a what appears to be a 'local' number, that does incur > non-trivial per-minute > charges. Without knowing _where_ a particular prefix is, you > can't tell > whether there will be toll charges for that call, or not, > from any given > call origin. Pardon my ignorance, but don't most phone companies require 10 digit dialing for long-distance. We have similar situations in the rural area I live in, but the customers know if they dial more than 7 digits, it WILL be long distance. > > Of course, this is true for *every* call in such an area -- > if the new law > is actually singling out ISPs (and ISPs -only-), I expect it could be > successfully challenged as 'discriminatory'. Agreed. It's silly to single out ISPs on this one. > > The excessive 'local toll charge' situation is most visible > on calls to ISPs, > because those calls tend to be somewhat lengthy -- and > frequent -- thus, the > 'unexpected' charges can reach significant dollar value > before the phone > customer gets their first bill. Agreed, but is this really the ISPs fault, or is it the customer's fault. > > Life gets _really_ messy, when the ISP gets phone service > from a CLEC, > because there is "no telling" _where_ the ILEC uses as the > 'rate point' > for handing the calls off to that CLEC. And the CLEC bills > their customers > based on distance from the caller's location to that hand-off > point. The > ISP equipment may be across the street from the caller, but > the ILEC-CLEC > hand-off is on the far edge of the area-code. and the 'local > toll charges' > are applied. > > The CLEC can't tell you (and thus, neither can the ISP) which > prefixes are a > 'non-toll' call to their numbeers. And trying to get an > authoritative answer > from the ILEC about what charges are to the CLEC's prefix can > be _very_ > difficult. I have never come across this, but it may be more of a metro area thing. :-) I think in the end this is a typical government attempt to solve a non-problem. They can easily do public service announcements to inform their constituents, or ask the phone companies to deal with it as it really is a problem for them. It is a charge on the hone bill, right. :-) - Brian J.
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