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In <199712210732.QAA12422@eccosys.com>, on 12/21/97
at 04:32 PM, Joichi Ito
At 10:36 97/12/20 -0500, Rabid Wombat wrote:
More like simple economics; after the breakup, a lot of pay phones were operated by companies specializing in this type of service. Pay phones are high maintenance, and their operators can only turn a profit by charging very high rates; if you make a quick call and ask the other party to call you back at the pay phone, the pay phone operator doesn't make much money.
Can you site any legislation barring pay phones from receiving calls? I'd think that most pay phone operators would be glad to deny incomming calls if they were allowed to (as they often are), and wouldn't need to be forced.
Can't a pay phone operator get paid a portion of incoming calls as well? If they can set outgoing rates to be very high, couldn't they set their incoming rates as well? (This is not an opinion, but a question.) I do know that depending on the arrangement, phone companies either carry all incoming call for free or cross bill incoming minutes to each other.
Currently I believe that pay phones are treated like any other phone number for incoming calls and billing to the customer (what money exchanes hands between telco's is another thing). While it would be possible for the telco to charge an inflated rate for calls to a pay phone some mechanism would need to be in place to inform the caller that it was a toll call (all payphones had a 999 area code as an example). - -- - --------------------------------------------------------------- William H. Geiger III http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii Geiger Consulting Cooking With Warp 4.0 Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail. OS/2 PGP 2.6.3a at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgpmr2.html - --------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.3a-sha1 Charset: cp850 Comment: Registered_User_E-Secure_v1.1b1_ES000000 iQCVAwUBNJzc/I9Co1n+aLhhAQJe7wQAhe/7licgPy91jlV1JQ1XzDgExE/YNdNX w07MD4DVS8KIpFfWIo702MXOe9TwfAC9j9SikPhycngIwrFTtv96lG+2xzvUjpTb ZIUICp3+2O2NE4WljkgK1p6KquHth9uWa02E5qAIDdd6x8OK+sJ1EaHxaz3mD9sp Kc56voHCuwo= =0iax -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----