On Mon, 17 July 2000, "Patrick W. Gilmore" wrote:
The telco world is completely different. *EVERY* call has an "origination" and a "termination", and *EVERY* termination is *PAID*.
Every "telco" termination is paid. However the telco's like to define some terminations as other than a telco, so the telco doesn't pay to terminate those calls. For example, in the USA calls to and from cellular carriers are charged access fees by the wireline carrier. Telco's first wanted to charge access fees for calls to ISPs, now they want a "Free-Ride"(tm) to terminate calls without reciprocal compensation to places they don't want to pay. I think a big difference is in the telco world, telco's collect more money for more call minutes they complete. If the call isn't completed, they don't get money. So telco's have an incentive to complete (and bill) as many call minutes as possible. Much of the US Internet is still flat-rate, so ISPs collect the same amount of money for most levels of service good or bad. ISPs have an incentive to deliver the least quality of service they can before losing customers. Even if an ISP has a multi-day outage, they bill for the service unless customers get so irate they may receive a token refund. Even ISPs with SLAs tend to make the refund procedure so cumbersome, they know its like giving out coupons instead of lowering the price. Only a small number of customers will ever get through the process and collect.