Least-Cost Routing Threatens Rural Phone Call Completion 205
New submitter kybred writes "Rural landline users are increasingly having problems with incoming calls not completing or being dropped. The culprit may be the bargain long distance carriers penchant for 'least cost routing' combined with the conversion of the Universal Service Fund to the Connect America Fund. From the Fine Article: 'Rural phone companies are the victim here," Steve Head says. "They charge a higher rate to terminate calls as it costs more for them. Shoreham Tel gets beat up because everyone calls them and says something is wrong with your system, but it's not. We've been through all of their lines and equipment and there is nothing wrong with it; it's the least-cost routing carriers.'"
Return it to Public Infrastructure (Score:4, Interesting)
I had to deal with this in our corporate PBX, we connect to a provider who does god-knows-what with the call. They do this least-cost routing, but when the call does not arrive it is on the customer to figure out WTF is going on. The provider saves .01 cents on your phone call and the customer pays for the call AND the support! What a way to run a business.
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It's up to the customer(s) to get together and test the different phone services that are doing this and make a detailed case to the FCC and FTC. If a irrefutable case can be made, one of the above organizations will fine the telco in question, hopefully for a large enough amount the telco decides it's not worth it.
Anyway, if you think this is happening complain to the FCC.
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It's up to the customer(s) to get together and test the different phone services that are doing this and make a detailed case to the FCC and FTC.
This is totally impractical. In order to test for this problem you need to make automated repeated long calls from many different locations towards a particular number and prove that it is statistically much worse than other numbers elsewhere. The only people who have this capability are the phone companies and even they don't all do it that widely.
Now that this has been reported, basically the FCC should demand that carriers, especially cheap VOIP providers, start testing it and audit them to make sure
Re:Return it to Public Infrastructure (Score:5, Interesting)
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So if that provider is Verizon, and they save the .01 cents say, 100,000,000 times, that means they're saving about $1,000,000.00. Right [youtube.com]?
RTFA.
The provider is not Verizon. If Verizon had a presence in these small towns there wouldn't be a problem. Its precisely because Verizon has no direct
route to these small rural companies that this problem has developed. Verizon hands off said calls to contract carriers who accept the call, calculate the price, and promptly drop the call. Verizon is none the wiser. The receiving party never gets the call, and is none the wiser. The calling party is left wondering WTF?
From TFA:
Least-cost routing can lead to dropped calls. What happens essentially is when one dials into Shoreham the call may be routed through, for instance, a Verizon router, and is then handed off to one of the hundreds of discount long-distance carriers. When this carrier’s computers quickly calculate that the call is a money loser because Shoreham Tel is allowed to charge a fraction more to access its lines, the secondary carrier simply drops the call.
Side-effect of ending traffic pumping? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Side-effect of ending traffic pumping? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the irony here. Least-cost routing is one "equal and opposite reaction" to the "sender pays" system and the way calls are billed at termination.
Many of the rural exchange operators signed deals with carriers like Level3 who operated large dialup modem pools in rural exchanges near big cities are looking for ways to use that interconnect. It's really hard to feel "sorry" for these rural phone companies when they went out of their way to get this traffic in the first place 10-15 years ago, and now have these same carriers representing a significant chunk of their business instead of just 1-3%.
Re:Side-effect of ending traffic pumping? (Score:5, Informative)
These rural phone companies also host free teleconfrence centers and chat lines. The goal is to have lots of callers with lots of time on the service. Many phone companies don't like the heavy drain of money to fund these free services. Low cost and free phone services are the first to pull the plug. Alternative phone services simply refuse to pay termination fees for low cost or free phone services to those rural companies. If you want to see this first hand, use Google Voice and call a free confrence room hosted in Iowa. It won't go through. Most VOIP servies block this money hole. ATT tried to block or charge LD fees to call these services, but the court blocked them.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090925/1607516327.shtml [techdirt.com]
"Free" market fail (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Free" market fail (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't need to move, they just need to pay enough so that their carriers won't charge higher fees for incoming calls.
Saying "regulation can fix this scenario" without specifying how is senseless. The bottom-line is, any regulation you impose in this case just passes the extra costs from rural citizens to everyone else. Therefore, if you as a society think that cheaper phone service is indispensable, you just impose a tax on everyone's phone bill and use it to subsidize rural users.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with having people pay the extra cost of living in the rural areas. Not to mention that other stuff (e.g. land) is cheaper than in the cities.
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Saying "regulation can fix this scenario" without specifying how is senseless. The bottom-line is, any regulation you impose in this case just passes the extra costs from rural citizens to everyone else. Therefore, if you as a society think that cheaper phone service is indispensable, you just impose a tax on everyone's phone bill and use it to subsidize rural users.
Personally, I see nothing wrong with having people pay the extra cost of living in the rural areas. Not to mention that other stuff (e.g. land) is cheaper than in the cities.
I disagree, when you have a complex problem saying that using a means to force action that has yet to be determined can be the start of getting things done. Then you need to form some sort of committee and work out what the best option is and it will likely end up being some kind of new rules to the game. The fact that the problem exists proves that self regulation of the market is not working in this instance and the government will have to step in in order to prevent the citizens from getting screwed b
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There's no market failure. The market isn't a magical way to create free lunches. It costs more to get a line to rural areas, and someone has to pay for that.
"The government has to step in" is a meaningless statement. The government doesn't have a magic wand that can make rural connectivity as cheap as urban. The only thing they can do is pass the costs to everyone else.
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There's no market failure. The market isn't a magical way to create free lunches. It costs more to get a line to rural areas, and someone has to pay for that.
"The government has to step in" is a meaningless statement. The government doesn't have a magic wand that can make rural connectivity as cheap as urban. The only thing they can do is pass the costs to everyone else.
This isn't a case of the market charging people more in rural areas, it's a case of the market failing and not providing service to people in rural areas. It's more than just an inconvenience - telephone service can be the difference between life and death in emergencies. It's probably much more important than electricity.
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telephone service can be the difference between life and death in emergencies.
So can living an hour closer to a hospital. What's point? There are risks, costs, and many benefits to living in any place. Weigh them and take your choice.
Should we have to build a ER in every small town? Do we need a fire station within 5min of ever country house along some road? Where do you draw the line? I have relatives that would probably be alive today if they had access to better emergency services and communications. I don't fault society though, they chose to live where they lived and lov
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Regulation did fix the mess, past tense. It wasn't until AT&T was broken up for straying too far from what it agreed to and market forces took over that things started becoming a mess again.
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Good or bad, that regulation did what I said it can do: it imposed a cost on everyone else to subsidize more expensive lines.
Re:"Free" market fail (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not from your country. But in any case, fine, I'll subsidize phones if they subsidize the much higher rent and land prices
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Getting farmers connected is important, enough so that Minnesota is spending its own money to run 100/100 fiber out to farms that are 35 miles outside the city.
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Not subsidizing Internet access is punishing? I guess I'm being punished!
Getting farmers connected is important
If they agree with that, I'm sure they'll invest in it. Farmers aren't stupid.
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Then they charge more for the food they ship.
It all comes fairer out in the end if everyone pays for the cost of their own services, as long as it's actually possible to apportion the bill properly.
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Cell phones are subsidized, in a way, but sat phones aren't. Sat phones cost the same to provide service no matter where in the world you are, because putting a satellite in the sky is a fixed cost and covers geographical area. They are limited in terms of how many customers a given satellite can handle, but the cost per customer for putting a satellite in the sky doesn't change regardless of whether a customer is in New York City or Alert.
Cellular phones, on the other hand, have a different set of problems
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There is no fundamental reason why those benefits are non-measurable. Some of them sound rather dubious. Stability of food availability? How is that helped by having inefficient subsidized farmers?
Re:"Free" market fail (Score:4, Informative)
You can't just telll the LD carriers "you must complete this call" if doing so costs them more than they charge.
The long distance carriers should take "you must complete this call" into account when setting their price.
Likewise, the small rural phone companies must receive enough revenue to maintain their operation.
Currently high fixed costs of maintaining the infrastructure are covered by higher per-call costs instead of higher monthly fees. Of course higher monthly fees won't be popular with people living in rural areas, but it would more accurately reflect the actual costs.
The only way this is going to get fixed is if sane regulation is brought to bear.
According to the article, there is regulation on paper but it is not enforced.
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The long distance carriers should take "you must complete this call" into account when setting their price.
The challenge is that other carriers can swoop in and pretend to be regular customers, sending precisely the most expensive calls to a provider but using other routes for the rest of the traffic -- "cherry picking". Carriers will typically deactivate the accounts when they discover the cherry picking, but that is a whack-a-mole game. The carriers can just price all calls at slightly above the highest possible termination fee, but then they would not be competitive.
The US can consider itself lucky in one way
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The challenge is that other carriers can swoop in and pretend to be regular customers, sending precisely the most expensive calls to a provider but using other routes for the rest of the traffic -- "cherry picking". Carriers will typically deactivate the accounts when they discover the cherry picking, but that is a whack-a-mole game.
From the article it seems that is already happening: those low-cost carriers that do not drop the call often forward it to another carrier, who makes the same tradeoff and forwards it again and in the end no-one connects to the recipient.
The only real solutions I can see is to either have uniform termination costs or have different quoted prices for routing a call depending on where that specific call is going. It seems the FCC is choosing the former, but that's a long-term solution. I'm guessing the latter
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The only real solution is to lower the actual termination costs by using cheaper technology. I.e. cell phones below 500MHz. I am having trouble imagining a place with low population density where that isn't cheaper than maintaining copper cables.
Keeping long copper lines alive is not sensible. They cannot provide decent Internet access and they are too expensive for phone use. Do you know if mobile providers get the same great termination fees?
If the market won't do it on its own because of the distortions,
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The solution is actually pretty easy and straightforward... get fiber close enough to 99% of Americans to achieve at least 512kbps down and 192kbps up (minimum guaranteed sustained level of service for each end user into the nearest NAP, with the expectation that real-world speeds would be 4-8 times faster, and "end user" defined in a way that guarantees that a house with 4 human inhabitants could get 2mbps down and 768k up of guaranteed aggregate bandwidth into the nearest big-city NAP), and establish a re
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The problem is finding non-whoring politicians to replace them with. After all they have to pay for all those campaign ads somehow...
Least Cost Routing, not ICBA Routing (Score:2, Insightful)
Hang on - it's 'least cost routing'. That means you do it for as little cost as you can mange, not that you only do it as long as it costs less than some arbitrary threshold.
If you can't route it for more than what you charge (on average) then you're not charging enough. You can't just drop the call!
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Hang on - it's 'least cost routing'. That means you do it for as little cost as you can mange, not that you only do it as long as it costs less than some arbitrary threshold.
If you can't route it for more than what you charge (on average) then you're not charging enough. You can't just drop the call!
Sure you can, as long as the FCC doesn't catch you.
Scapegoat (Score:3)
Baloney. If least cost routing were at fault VoIP services like Vonage would fail long before a rural telco. Whatever the problem is at Shoreham Telephone it has nothing to do with least cost routing and everything to do with their technical infrastructure and choice of direct vendors.
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The article is flawed - it calls the algorithm least-cost routing. In reality, it is a fixed-maximum-cost routing:
if (cost_per_minute > ARBITRARY_CUTOFF)
drop_call();
Part of it is that (Score:3)
So we need to revisit the termination scheme for telecom. Otherwise what will happen is that you won't be able to complete calls into the backwaters of the U.S. Only serves them right for getting greedy!
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How high are the termination fees? And who sets the fees?
Just for comparison, effective today the new termination fees to landline numbers in Germany are between 0.25 and 0.61 euro cent. The fees are set by the federal network agency and of course with every fee reduction the carriers are bitching.
Yup - That's Us (Score:5, Informative)
I live in southwest Montana and we're serviced by a rural telephone co-op. I work in Big Sky, Montana, and you might recognize that name because it's one of the biggest ski resorts in the country. This problem didn't really exist three years ago and has increased significantly in just the past year. For those of you unfamiliar with rural telephone co-ops, here's a smattering of what it's like.. because it's QUITE different than dealing with carriers or even your local CLEC:
1. Rural telephone co-ops are exempt from the 1995 Telecommunications Act. That means all sorts of things, one of which was they were until very recently exempt from providing E911 service. (This is something your local PSAP probably takes for granted. We're about 15 years behind the times.)
2. We can't call a lot of Google Voice numbers. I'm not sure why. Possibly it's because the local co-op has a problem with their dial plan settings, that happens. However, some Google Voice numbers do work. It's just weird.
3. There's a lot of companies that provide hosted toll free numbers and provide both ACD-like services as well as collecting ANI so you can run all kinds of nice reports. We use services like that and increasingly we've run into a lot of problems because sometimes they outright can't transfer calls to our local DID's. Typically those kind of companies use cheapo LD carriers, but they also usually have a few PRI's with major carriers like AT&T. We usually have to request they change their default routing to use one of those carriers instead.
4. On the flipside, we have surprisingly good Internet service. Three years ago we put in a 50x5Mbps connection and this year we augmented it with a 26x1. All of that service costs us $500 a month. That's not as spectacular of a deal as it was 3 years ago, but considering where we are, it's pretty impressive. At home, I've got fiber to our house - not bad for a community of 838 people.
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Can't the co-op terminate calls with anybody they choose? If you have a pipe, why wouldn't you tunnel SIP to the provider with the best/cheapest fees? "Peer" with local co-ops directly, and maybe even set up a clearinghouse for co-ops that brokers interconnects with the LECs and CLECs.
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There's some things I don't understand, but this is my take:
1. I have no idea why some Google Voice calls don't terminate. Something at the IXC / ILEC level probably comes into play and I don't understand how IXC's work here and what the relationship really is between our co-op and the ILEC (originally US West). My guess would be they're small and without much depth.
2. Regarding, "If you have a pipe", do you mean us or the carriers? The reason we're not tunneling SIP is we have a traditional PBX (actua
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You're paying $500/mo for phone+internet. I'm paying less than $60, and have never had the kind of problems calling other carriers like you describe. You are getting faster Internet speeds than I am, but I could get a 10mbit upload and half the download you're getting, and still keep my monthly bill under $100/mo, without needing to switch from DSL, and if I really needed the faster download speed, my provider will let me use MLPPP to bind multiple lines.
You may consider it a good deal, but I don't. I would
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See my other reply for more details. But specifically:
1. We don't really have a home phone. My wife and I only have cell phones. However, we are required to have an analog telephone line because we have Internet service at home. We don't use it, but the rural telephone co-op ONLY sells their Internet service bundled with phone service. Let me repeat that - it's not possible to purchase unbundled DSL here. They are not an ILEC, so someone like Covad has no access to the local loop. Since they have a
Pay for your own infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
The boonies are usually red areas that vote republican and spout off nonsense about being independent of Obama and the evil liberals who suck up all the money
Here is your chance to practice what you preach
Pay for your lifestyle
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What the hell do you think we did before people got all up in our junk with taxes to support the inner-city welfare state? Here's a hint: counties didn't have road-grade equipment until recently, let alone right-of-way zones. We managed to make it through the industrial revolution with limited support from Washington and lower taxes; funny we can't live without 'em today, isn't it?
Also, guess what? Our fire department (what there is of it)
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Generally the rural Red states get more back from the government than they pay in taxes.
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Re:Pay for your own infrastructure (Score:4, Informative)
No, he's just pointing out that they're hypocrites.
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They're only hypocritical if they're allowed to exempt themselves from taxes imposed by the party they didn't vote for.
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That article was hilarious! It's long so let me paraphrase for Slashdot readers who don't have time to read it all: "Rural parents refuse to teach their children science, history, sociology, or critical thinking; then invent a conspiracy theory to explain why their kids can't get into college".
59 percent (Score:5, Insightful)
And cheap calls is all it is. They want to pay the same as everyone else. Look, I spent a lot of time living in rural areas in the US and elsewhere. I know the issues. I know the costs. But I am not asking anyone else to pay costs that I choose in incur. In other countries you have phone service. You just pay for a cell phone. And if you have to you pay for a booster station. That is all there is too it. There are very few areas in the US that have no cell reception, and I am sure most would work with a booster. Hell, in my house I don't have good cell reception. Do I go to the feds and demand a personal booster?
If you want reliable phone, do what others have done. Form a cooperative. Pull fiber to the community, and then have the individuals pull wire to their properties. Say this is too expensive, say that the feds should pay for it? Well them maybe you should vote for a liberal government who will tax enough to fund it?
What I feel is really funny is that somehow taxpayers are expected to foot the bill so that people can just pick up the phone whenever they want to just to chat, and we are expected to pay for that entitlement. Give me a break. When I was growing up we often did not talk to our extended family. Why? Because it was expensive and we could not afford it. Maybe once a week on sunday morning, but that was it. I guess we had the advantage is that we were literate so we wrote letters.
I normally am much more receptive to these complaints. We are a rich country so we should have universal reliable communication, health care, education, transportation, teleportation, rib eye, Helly Hansen clothing, but given that those people just voted in great majority against it, it seems a little over the top.
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
The rural areas already have service installed and wire/firbe pulled to their homes. They have no need for federal assistance and who they voted for has NOTHING to do with this. (Can we please get past this election stupidity.)
The issue is that because the routes to rural services cost more, many carriers and long distance providers will not route calls to them. That means that when Jr. moves to NYC and leaves Granny in BFE, Jr. can't call Granny. She has service and she can call him in NYC, but Verizon or
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"Free Nationwide Long Distance Plan". read that again. You are saying it is ok for Verizon to sell a "Free Nationwide Long Distance Plan" and then refuse to route certain calls because it is to expensive.
I call that fraud. It is bait and switch. They can either not sell the plan at all or increase the price of it to cover their costs.
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No, the actual fair and correct solution is:
3. Rural customers' bills are increased to the point where they cover the extra costs for small-scale operations and more miles of wire per house. This may mean charging the rural customers per-minute for incoming long distance calls.
Telcos from the boonies then have the funds so they can afford to charge their peers reasonable market rates for routing calls. Calls don't get dropped anymore.
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Why is more reasonable to charge loop customers more but not carriers? Seriously if Verizon and AT&T want to offer sell unlimited nation wide LD they should either build out the last mile infrastructure themselves or pay the MARKET rate for call termination in that area.
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Because those *particular* loop customers, who are way out there in the boondocks, cost more to connect to. The people out there enjoying all that open space and fresh air should pay the higher cost of their lifestyle choices themselves.
AT&T and Verizon don't need to buy anything from anyone if they don't want to.
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Right in this case its not the rural customer that is being subsided here. They are paying for their service, and their operator is providing termination to other carriers. Its these other carriers who don't like the rates. The problem is they want to offer unlimited nation wide long distance dirt cheap. Well then they either need to charge more or eat some margin when customers make high cost calls to rural telephone operators.
The problem is not the folks in BFE, it Jr. in NYC is not willing to pay the
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Were they voting for smaller government and lower taxes, or just voting against minorities who steal tax dollars. I don't know, but the reality is that these people voting for a candidate who did not support the federal government building infrastructure that makes the US urban areas strong. So why do they expect the urban people to pay taxes so they can get cheap calls?
Because, despite who they voted for, they didn't get smaller government and lower taxes. What you're saying is that the people who vote for low tax/small government should still have to pay the high taxes imposed by the successful ideology and not benefit from the things the government spends that tax on.
The conservative position consists of two points: low taxes and individuals paying for their own services. You can't impose high taxes, and then accuse them of betraying their ideals when they demand they a
Surprise! (Score:2)
Customers want to pay a cheaper rate for phone calls. Imagine that!
Wouldn't it be great if we had a defacto monopoly that made sure that there was adequate revenue from long-distance calls to subsidize local service in rural areas, so that it wouldn't cost $300 per month to have a telephone? High-volume users would, of course, be paying for all the infrastructure to complete calls. It might even have side effects, like if phone calls were more expensive it might cut down on telemarketing (because it woul
The real victims are the customers (Score:2)
I work for a small rural telecom, and we deal with this issue quite literally every week. Someone who lives out in what most would consider the middle of nowhere, ends up having a call completion issue. And who do they blame? Their telephone company, of course. After all, we provide the telephone service, and people assume that a paid service is supposed to just work. Telling these people to move back to a city is ridiculous also, as many of them are running farms or performing other (sometimes astronomy re
Spanning Trees (Score:2)
I have GMAVT (Waitsfield Telecom) 'service" (Score:3)
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toll quality calling (Score:2)
Re:to be expected (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they do. In return, they get things like rights-of-way for running their lines and placing their equipment in areas which are highly profitable.
The telcos have no right to make use of public resources to simply "skim the cream."
Re:to be expected (Score:4, Informative)
You're missing the point. These people HAVE phone service, but due to the way phone companies share the money that the calling customers pay for a call across networks, some inbound calls do not connect. When you pay your phone company to call someone on another network, your phone company pays that other network to connect the call. Phone companies charge different rates for that. When there's a mismatch between what the originating network expects to pay and what the terminating network asks, then the call is dropped somewhere along the line where a least cost long distance provider decides that the pay is not enough to cover the costs and render a profit. The callee never knows and the caller just experiences a call not going through.
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Long distance providers are extremely competitive, I cannot see them dropping a call they would make even 0.1 cent on.
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You aren't really looking, then. The providers that you pay are paying someone else. Nobody runs their own worldwide network. Somewhere, someone cuts corners, for one of many reasons. Whoever sends calls to them gets screwed. The example telco in this article should figure out who the major call dropping problem carrier is, and refuse to accept calls from them at all. There is probably one or two bad actors in each case that fuck it up for everyone.
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True, but why would a long distance provider have limited capacity?
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Long distance carriers, certainly the cheap ones, have gone VoIP. Phone calls are only about 100kbps worst case, and if you don't care about quality you can go much lower than that. A 1Gbps pipe can handle at least 10,000 simultaneous calls, and even at the razor-thin margins of long distance carriers it is easy to afford 10Gbps if you are dealing with 10,000 simultaneous calls. On top of that comes the traffic costs, but 100kbps is 750 kB/minute. 0.1 cent/minute is at least an order of magnitude more than
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Sounds like a plan, so when is the telcos going to pay back all that public money we gave them to build out the rural system?
Because they owe all of it back WITH INTEREST if they go with your really stupid plan.
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Good luck with that eating habit when the farmers move to the city.
Meanwhile, I guess if the telcos are not going to have any special responsibilities anymore, they get no special privileges.It seems there's a minor matter of all that copper they buried in my yard without paying rent. I guess I'll sell it on ebay.
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If some farmers move to the city, the others will raise their prices, and then the city people will have the choice of lowering their consumption or paying more, instead of being forced to pay for everyone in rural areas, regardless of whether they actually produce food or not.
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Yes, because more expensive food is so good for everyone! Especially the poor. The sooner we starve them out the better!
Meanwhile I'll be off practicing some free market with that 'abandoned' copper in my yard!
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As I said elsewhere, if we want to help the poor buy food, we should do just that, and not use a crazy scheme that helps them only very indirectly, and wastes most of the money.
That argument is just a different type of "think of the children!!"
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Yes, because more expensive food is so good for everyone!
Yes, that is pretty much correct. Free market (i.e. more expensive) food prices is a good way to ensure that the food provided is what people want. Random subsidies distort the market, and distorted markets tend to produce the wrong things.
Especially the poor. The sooner we starve them out the better!
Helping the poor should be done directly, not by distorting markets. One solution which involves very little administrative overhead is citizen's income.
Food cannot be entirely left to the free market; demand is too inelastic and supply too unpredictable for that. Governm
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Last time I checked, people in cities paid for all of that.
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Yes, and the more that the farmers have to pay for communications, the more they'll have to charge you for food.
The Internet is not a luxury for farmers these days any more than it is for any other business. We're constantly being bombarded with news stories about how, by virtue of various data services farmers make themselves more productive.
One way or another, however, you - the farm products consumer - end up footing the bill for it. The question is, do you want farmers to have to pay for their data serv
Re:to be expected (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, and the more that the farmers have to pay for communications, the more they'll have to charge you for food.
They already charge me for food. You mean charge more, I assume, but I'm fine with that. Even if we want to help some people who can't afford food, it's much saner to subsidize that (possibly with food stamps) than doing a crazy scheme of indirectly taxing and subsidizing everyone.
The Internet is not a luxury for farmers these days any more than it is for any other business. We're constantly being bombarded with news stories about how, by virtue of various data services farmers make themselves more productive.
Great! If it makes them more productive, that just means it actually costs them less.
One way or another, however, you - the farm products consumer - end up footing the bill for it. The question is, do you want farmers to have to pay for their data services at retail rates, one farm at a time, or wholesale rates, through some sort of organization?
However they want, I don't presume to decide for them. Farmers are not children, and they are much more informed than me about their local rates and whether it'd make sense or not to form a co-op.
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Stuff going on in countries with a less developed communications infrastructure can still be of value to the rest of us.
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Re:This is in the US, right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:RURAL MEANS THE BOONIES !! (Score:4, Interesting)
They expect to receive the service they paid for. Same as those living in the middle of a 5 mil+ city.
If the company can't provide them with the service, they shouldn't have sold it. I doubt on their contract says anywhere that X% of the calls will be randomly dropped.
I see one solution for them, for those companies I mean. Skype or something similar. Calls anywhere in the world for a flat fee. Bypass those "carriers" entirely.
Re:RURAL MEANS THE BOONIES !! (Score:4, Informative)
No internet in the boonies, so how you expecting skype to work? magical skype dust?
The ONLY option for broadband for most rural people is satellite internet. and upload is typically isdn speeds AND you have a minimum of 3000ms latency. which blows to hell skype calls.
Re:RURAL MEANS THE BOONIES !! (Score:4, Insightful)
Thought so.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:RURAL MEANS THE BOONIES !! (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't have to. You and I are paying for it with the Universal Service Fund, or Connect America Fund, as TIL it's called. The carriers are trying to increase profits by making that fund a profit, instead of using it for what it was originally designed for - to bring affordable phone service to those living out in rural areas. To me, this should be handled the same as a tax evasion or fraud case. It is a government enforced "tax" after all, and if one penny of that fund goes to anything other than to provide service to the rural community, someone should go to jail.
Re:RURAL MEANS THE BOONIES !! (Score:5, Informative)
They don't have to. You and I are paying for it with the Universal Service Fund, or Connect America Fund, as TIL it's called. The carriers are trying to increase profits by making that fund a profit, instead of using it for what it was originally designed for - to bring affordable phone service to those living out in rural areas. To me, this should be handled the same as a tax evasion or fraud case. It is a government enforced "tax" after all, and if one penny of that fund goes to anything other than to provide service to the rural community, someone should go to jail.
Lets just get over the fact that there is going to be a profit, OK?
Nobody builds a telephone company to break even or run at a loss. Get over it.
You are basically saying that these rural phone companies can't take any profit unless they forego the fund.
The fund is there to level the playing field so that rural customers can afford telephone service, because without it the customer to infrastructure ratio would make it unprofitable to provide service at all. The fund is there PRECISELY to make it possible to provide the service to these areas AND a profit to the phone company owners. It is working as intended.
Universal Service Fund isn't even directly involved here.
I suggest you RTFA again.
Least-cost routing can lead to dropped calls. What happens essentially is when one dials into Shoreham the call may be routed through, for instance, an ATT router, and is then handed off to one of the hundreds of discount long-distance carriers. When this carrier’s computers quickly calculate that the call is a money loser because Shoreham Tel is allowed to charge a fraction more to access its lines, the secondary carrier simply drops the call.
The problem is unscrupulous call routing services that do not fulfill their contractual obligation to route the call if the only route available has a slightly higher cost.
They simply drop the call, and notify the carrier that the call ended. (They lie).
These call routing services are middle men, responsible only to the carriers with which they contract. They are virtually unregulated.
This is strictly a contract law problem. The big carriers need to hold those call routing services feet to the fire, or use their own call routing facilities.
Re:RURAL MEANS THE BOONIES !! (Score:4, Insightful)
While you are otherwise correct, I do have to complain about one thing you said.
Nobody builds a telephone company to break even or run at a loss. Get over it.
Yes they do. It's called a cooperative. It's legally (and actually) a non-profit. They're relatively common in the rural southwest, because even with the USF, it was impossible to attract a for-profit carrier to the region. I still have my membership certificate for one in Texas I used for a while.
Personally I think all utilities should be run as co-ops. Extracting a profit for a life-essential service like water is wrong. Fortunately most states still have avid Public Utilities Commissions that strongly regulate water utilities, but all it would take is some asshole shouting "deregulate" long enough and that could change. And that would be unfortunate.
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Cooperatives generally don't make a good business model, except among relatively small groups of co-dependent people. They succumb too easily to the "Tragedy of the Commons", neglect, and resistance of the membership to new investment. Too often the turn into declining organizations, with disintegrating physical plant, due to neglect or under-funding, and most end up being sold to some for-profit company.
But even co-ops have to find investors to fund new infrastructure. You can't wait till everyone in t
Re:RURAL MEANS THE BOONIES !! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm currently a member of an electric cooperative and it does all of those things you imply are the sole province of for-profit organizations. It maintains a capital fund for operations, maintenance, replacement, and expansion. Nobody pays dues. We pay our electric bill. The bill is itemized with two items: the actual cost of the electricity we consume, and a daily availability fee that maintains that capital fund and pays for the employees and plant. I pay 1/3rd to as little as 1/4th what people a mile away from me who fall in the for-profit electric company's operating area pay, and I get MORE reliable service. This is not a made-up claim from my co-op, either. This is statistics from the state PUC.
The co-op is 71 years old and has better plant than the for-profit company in the region. If state law could be changed to allow the co-op to enter incorporated cities, the for-profit company would very likely go out of business in the state. The for-profit company lobbies heavily on a constant basis to prevent just that.
Nor is the co-op small. It collects just over $100 million in revenue annually.
Yes the co-op has debt. It's long term debt commensurate with the size of the organization, and the rates are far from usurious. The co-op has an excellent credit rating. Having and servicing such debt is a normal business practice and the co-op does it for the same reason a business does: it benefits the co-op. In truth, the balance sheet looks quite similar to a for-profit corporation of similar size, with the exception that there is no line item labeled Net Profit. There is nothing wrong with charging money to provide service, maintain standards, expand as needed, and generally take care of business. The co-op intentionally charges a little more than required to maintain the capital fund, then five years down the road, pays out capital fund refunds of the overage to its owners: me and my neighbors.
I suppose, once upon a time, paying the initial investors had a place in the balance sheet. They don't anymore. The co-op can pay off initial investors, instead of forever having a vampire sucking money out of its balance sheets at my expense. There is no small, privileged group of investors who get to pull money out of the organization just because they had money 70 years ago. More to the point, there is no small, privileged group of investors with voting control of stock who gets to fuck up the organization and its service for their sole short-term financial benefit. Everything is wrong with "making money" on utilities, water, electric or indeed, telecommunications, and that last is one of the main reasons applicable today.
There are co-ops and then there are co-ops. A co-op with correctly written bylaws is incredibly robust. Non-profits are neither simplistic nor short sighted when set up properly and run well.
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Lets just get over the fact that there is going to be a profit, OK? Nobody builds a telephone company to break even or run at a loss. Get over it.
You are basically saying that these rural phone companies can't take any profit unless they forego the fund.
I have no problem with them making profit, that's what the monthly fees are for. The USF is for building and maintaining the infrastructure, or helping to build and maintain it - it should not be used to pay for that infrastructure building and maintenance in full. Nor should the USF in any way be used to pay anyone's salary, other than those maintaining the lines and poles, and again, not in full. It's supposed to help not provide.
Least-cost routing can lead to dropped calls. What happens essentially is when one dials into Shoreham the call may be routed through, for instance, an ATT router, and is then handed off to one of the hundreds of discount long-distance carriers. When this carrier’s computers quickly calculate that the call is a money loser because Shoreham Tel is allowed to charge a fraction more to access its lines, the secondary carrier simply drops the call.
The problem is unscrupulous call routing services that do not fulfill their contractual obligation to route the call if the only route available has a slightly higher cost.
They simply drop the call, and notify the carrier that the call ended. (They lie).
These call routing services are middle men, responsible only to the carriers with which they contract. They are virtually unregulated.
This is strictly a contract law problem. The big carriers need to hold those call routing services feet to the fire, or use their own call routing facilities.
I suggest you RTFA again.
Yes, I got off into a tangent on the USF usage. I don't believe anyone s
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I have no problem with them making profit, that's what the monthly fees are for.
Well, that's not how I read your prior post where you said: The carriers are trying to increase profits by making that fund a profit,
By and large the carriers don't benefit much from USF. Over all, they are net PAYERS. Its the small local/rural phone companies that receive this money, as well as schools, hospitals, and the poor (via government subsidized life line service connections. (And, ...running and ducking... Obama Phones [youtube.com]).
You said:
The USF is for building and maintaining the infrastructure, or helping to build and maintain it - it should not be used to pay for that infrastructure building and maintenance in full. Nor should the USF in any way be used to pay anyone's salary, other than those maintaining the lines and poles, and again, not in full. It's supposed to help not provide.
Check again what the Goals of the USF [wikipedia.org] are.
Offsetting higher opera
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One of the conditions given to AT&T before they were granted a monopoly was to provide universal service. Now that pure market forces are in place instead, that goal is dropped. It won't be just rural areas, what about dropped lines in poor areas of cities.
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If the company can't provide them with the service, they shouldn't have sold it.
The company is providing perfect service. Outgoing calls are working great.
Incoming calls, however, are not reaching the company. There is nothing the company can do about that.
The reason for the problem is that providers get money for handling incoming calls, and rural telecoms get more (they have more infrastructure to maintain per billed minute). Regular customers tend to pay the same price to call all of the US, and so the cheaper providers end up actually losing money on calls to rural areas. Therefore
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If the company can't provide them with the service, they shouldn't have sold it
The company is providing the service just fine. It's the other companies' faults that they don't want to let calls go through to this company.
Reminds me a whole lot about the whole network neutrality thing. If Ed Whitacre was still at SBC/AT&T, I'd expect the next thing we see would be an article from him about how these rural people shouldn't get to use his networks for free.
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Like, um, duh?