Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utcsrgv.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utcsrgv!dave
From: dave@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Sherman)
Newsgroups: net.consumers
Subject: Re: bothersome phone calls
Message-ID: <4950@utcsrgv.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 19-Jul-84 16:17:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: utcsrgv.4950
Posted: Thu Jul 19 16:17:48 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Jul-84 16:24:17 EDT
References: <36@whuxl.UUCP> <3313@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Organization: The Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto
Lines: 33

In article <3313@brl-tgr.ARPA> wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin) writes:
~| It was my impression that the justification for charging for having an 
~| unlisted number was that the telco incurred more "information" calls
~| as a result of people not finding your name & number in the book. This
~| was prior to the current practice of charging callers for "information"
~| calls, which I believe is now just about universal.

Yes, but we only get charged for calls to directory assistance when
the number is in the phone book (i.e., no charge if they can't find
the number, or if it's a new listing). So charging for directory
assistance doesn't reduce the cost of people calling for unlisted numbers.
Anyway, if you know a number should be in the book, and you know it's
not a new listing, why bother calling d.a. at all?

~|							This latter should
~| eliminate the costs the telcos used to justify charging the holder of
~| an unlisted number, right?

I'd always assumed the charge was related to the cost of keeping a
separate list of people who should be billed but not listed. (Or
of keeping a field associated with every billed name to indicate
whether they should be listed or not.) There's definitely a cost
associated with storing that extra information for millions of people,
even if the variable cost of storing the "unlisted" bit for a particular
user is virtually nil.


Dave Sherman
Toronto
-- 
 {allegra,cornell,decvax,ihnp4,linus,utzoo}!utcsrgv!dave
or
 David_Sherman%Wayne-MTS%UMich-MTS.Mailnet@MIT-Multics.ARPA