Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Mon, 20 May 1991 03:24:19 GMT From: Floyd Davidson Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: 50k Counts of Wire Fraud Message-ID: Organization: University of Alaska Institute of Marine Science Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 379, Message 3 of 10 Lines: 46 In article cybrspc!roy@cs.umn.edu (Roy M. Silvernail) writes: > TONY@mcgill1.bitnet (Tony Harminc) writes: >> Are you USAers happy with the possibility of paying for seven-digit >> calls? Why is there no 1+ requirement to let you know ? It seems a >> little silly that everyone should have to remember a huge list of >> prefixes in order to avoid placing expensive calls, whether 540 or 976 >> type, or just normal toll calls within the NPA. > I used to have to do just that in Alaska. Toll calls from Anchorage > did not require a leading 1 when I lived there, and you could as > easily be calling across the state as across town. > While it didn't have _quite_ the potential for surprise as the 540 > scam, it could still be expensive. Alaska used to have abominable > in-state rates. It was cheaper to call Los Angeles than to call Nome. > I don't know what the rates are, these days. The rates are lower, but the ratio is still the same. LA would be cheaper than Nome. I don't know for sure, but isn't intrastate service more expensive than interstate just about everywhere? Part of breaking up AT&T was separating the costs and making each part pay for itself. It used to be that your call to LA was charged at a higher rate than it actually cost, just so that your rate calling Nome could be charged less than what it really cost. Now the interstate rate structure is based on the cost of providing interstate service, and the same with intrastate service. As a result, your call from Anchorage to Nome is no longer being subsidised by calls to LA. Instead the call to Nome is charged a higher rate to help subsidise calls to places like Sleetmute (a small village that will never generate enough revenue to pay 20% of the cost to provide service). That just happens to be one of the "down" sides to breaking up the old system. There are other sides that are very much "up". Floyd L. Davidson | Alascom, Inc. pays me, |UA Fairbanks Institute of Marine floyd@ims.alaska.edu| but not for opinions. |Science suffers me as a guest.