On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 11:38 AM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
Well... if you make a phone call to a rural area, or a 3rd world country, with a horrible system, is it your telco's responsibility to go out there and fix it?
Hi Miles, The telephone companies offer a remarkably apt case study in how NOT to do traffic hand off. With the advent of CLECs, the incumbent phone companies fought tooth and nail against simple settlement-free interconnection. They were deathly afraid of CLECs wiring up office buildings at a discount and then stranding the ILECs with the more expensive residential and small users. They convinced the FCC to dictate an originator-pays strategy where both companies must assure sufficient capacity between their systems and then the originating system pays the receiving system a couple pennies a minute. So sure, wire up all those office buildings. They're going to mainly call our customers and we'll collect the money from you instead. As you can imagine, hilarity ensued: some CLECs actually paid Internet Service Providers to accept PRIs because the PRIs only ever received calls and they tended to be heavily used 24 hours a day. The CLECs got their entire revenue from per-minute charges the ILECs had insisted the FCC require. Modern arrangements between CLECs and ILECs are somewhat less insane. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004