From: "Steven J. Sobol" <sjsobol@nacs.net> Ameritech offers the same service, and I've only been charged for the times I've actually used the feature. If I hang up, I don't get charged. I have to believe BellSouth works the same way, although I could be wrong.
Ameritech doesn't offer it here in Michigan, so I don't know what problems there are. In Mississippi, it works like this: Busy tone is replaced by a voice message saying something like "Your party is currently busy. If you would like to call again, press 1 or hold the line." If you hold the line too long (30 seconds?), or you redial a number with a 1 in it (several of our hunt groups have a 1 in them), you get charged $.75... But nobody has gotten phone bills yet, so we don't know how bad the financials are. The support calls are all folks trying to kindly tell us that our phone lines have stopped working, because of the messages shown by the modem software, which expects a busy signal. And if you call BellSouth to complain, they tell you to signup for BellSouth.Net :-( WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32