In order to make sure that tiny rural communities have phone service, the companies in those areas are allowed to charge other phone companies high rates for inbound calls. For example, when you call New York City, Verizon might charge your phone company $0.0025/minute (one quarter cent) to complete the call. But when you call Podunk, Iowa, PodunkTel is charging your phone company $0.12/minute – almost 50 times as much.

Meanwhile, your phone company is still charging you the normal $0.02/minute rate that it sets for all calls to USA numbers, because it’s too complicated to have a separate rate for some obscure towns in Iowa (they might not even be allowed to charge a higher rate for calling those towns, I’m not sure about the regs). They just lose money when you happen to call those towns, and hope that you won’t do it too much.

This margin is what paid for the international call service.

Ben: No, UK cell phones are too expensive to call, nobody can provide “free” service to them except for the operators themselves.

These companies should advertise a free calling card platform for those 50 countries. ATT must pay the access fee’s, the calls were made to the IA ILEC.

The issue is with the NECA rates for access fee’s.

http://www.myvoipprovider.com/VoIPNewsArchive/VoIPGeneralNews/FREEInternationalCallsandlettheUSTaxpayerfootthebill_20070130597/

I’m surprised the US isn’t more liberal when it comes to telecos – competition is good!

Charlie

FuturePhone and its brethren got shut down because they went after carrier’s primary business, phone calls. It doesn’t surprise me that these guys got shut down pretty promptly.

One of the rural LECs we use does not allow international calling services like this, so he shuts them down proactively, to avoid attracting litigation from the carriers.

Rural LEC termination is an attractive way to offer a low cost service to users, but it’s risky, and therefore wise to have other ways to generate revenue in case you do get cut off, have to relocate, etc.

Basically, it’s part of the various efforts (such as the Universal Service Fund) to subsidize rural phone network costs. Subsidies often create arbitrage opportunities. (Or, if you like, “waste, fraud, and abuse.”)

It’s not extremely different from, say, a high school getting subsidized to buy computers at less than cost, and then selling those computers. The difference is that the ephemeral nature of the phone calls meant that the plan could scale up much greater– at least until the subsidizing phone companies and regulators noticed.

早上是我最后一次作为GA（研究生助理）带实验，给学生答疑。没几个学生在实验室，因此我就上del.icio.us网站转转，又一次顺藤摸瓜地看到了一个（通过VoIP方式）免费拨打国际电话的网站：F…

hmm… What about Google Maps Click2Call?? Who pays that termination bill? Anyone??

Does GOOG have an official telco partner?

Live.com Maps ClicktoCall is powered by MCI aka Verizon according to past PR. Perhaps today it may be mixed with a sprinkle of Nortel via the OfficeLive.com platform..?