Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!know!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!apple!bionet!hayes.fai.alaska.edu!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: ndallen@contact.uucp (Nigel Allen) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: US Long Distance Billing Scheme is a Crock Message-ID: <10325@accuvax.nwu.edu> Date: 1 Aug 90 06:46:10 GMT Sender: news@accuvax.nwu.edu Reply-To: ndallen@contact.UUCP (Nigel Allen) Organization: Contact Public Unix BBS. Toronto, Canada. Lines: 20 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 535, Message 5 of 11 Regular readers of comp.dcom.telecom may remember that Canadian Telex service is billed by pulses, rather than by detailed billing. I suspect the same is true for Western Union's domestic Telex service in the U.S. In the absence of detailed billing, the Telex operator at Dalhousie University's Kellogg Health Sciences Library used a stop-watch to time calls so that end-users could be charged for their outgoing Telex messages. (This was thirteen years ago, when I was a student at Dalhousie and worked on the student newspaper there, _The Dalhousie Gazette_. We used Telex to send and receive news to and from Canadian University Press, the national organization of Canadian English-language student newspapers, which had its own Telex machine in Ottawa. Of course, it helped that the library's Telex operator was our editor's cousin.) Most news moved by mail back then; Telex was only for particularly urgent material.