Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!haven!decuac!netsys!vector!telecom-gateway From: pdg@chinet.chi.il.us (Paul Guthrie) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Automatic Collect Calls Message-ID: Date: 19 Aug 89 17:26:53 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: Paul Guthrie Organization: The League of Crafty Hackers Lines: 27 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us In article zygot!john@apple.com (John Higdon) writes: >This raises some interesting questions. Where is the billing >information stored for charging the called party? In the phone? By some >special arrangement with whatever carrier they use for the call? What >if the called party refuses the call? Does the COCOT owner pay for the >one-minute refusal? The billing info is indeed stored inside the COCOT phone itself. This has actually been going on for a while with this sort of phone, at least with calling card (0+) types of calls. This sort of phone is the salvation of COCOTS, since now they don't have to give up a large percentage of operator assisted calls to AOSs, but can do all of the processing themselves. If indeed the COCOTs and the AOSs are the same company, then they still save manpower and backhauling costs, and naturally, switch capacity. As far as the carrier, most likely the phone will casual call (10XXX) some IXC (Sprint is a usual choice). There is no special arrangement (other than a Business bulk billing arrangement), since this is in essence a normal call (except to the phone itself :-) . Due to this, the COCOT owners do eat the costs of refused calls, but this is reflected back to customers in their higher costs. -- Paul Guthrie chinet!nsacray!paul