North American Network Operators Group

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Re: New N.Y. Law Targets Hidden Net LD Tolls

  • From: John Levine
  • Date: Fri Aug 19 12:38:35 2005

> Face it, 7D is dead; and even if overlays had not arrived, cell
> phones would have killed it. Once you learn to think 10D, it's
> trivial.

Oh, you ignorant rednecks.*  Even my cell phone has 7D dialing and
it'll be a century before overlays arrive where I live.

The reason that it makes sense for an ISP to warn its customers about
surprise toll calls is that toll rates have gotten so low that for the
most part, we don't worry about them.  Due to the peculiar
telegeography in my area, a 7D call within my area code could be
local, intra-LATA toll, or inter-LATA toll.  But the most expensive of
those is 8 cents/min so for voice calls, I don't care, and I really
appreciate not having the insane Texas plan where you have to memorize
every single local prefix to be able to make a fripping phone call.

Since ISP calls are long, even low toll rates add up, and that makes
them unusual enough to be worth warning people.

I really have to put some of the blame on telcos here.  Every prefix
in the country is assigned to a rate center, every phone has a set of
rate centers that are local, and it's not rocket science to do the
cross-product and tell people what numbers are local to them.  CLEC or
ILEC doesn't matter, nor does the location of the switch.  I realize
there are a few wacky prefixes that are local to the whole LATA, but
they seem to be getting less common rather than more, and there's few
enough of them to special case.

R's,
John

* - from small towns along the MD/VA border that combine northern
charm with southern efficiency