In article <telecom23.584.1@telecom-digest.org>,
marc_nospam@ldezign.com says:
> Hi,
> I'm currently working on a venture possibility in my small town that
> is an hour away from a major City.
> Placing call to that major city(town A) is a long distance from my
> town (town B). But a town in between (town C) is not a long distance
> for both ends.
> People would call from town A to town C and reach town B without any
> additional charge besides the monthly charge from the services of my
> own company.
> That software would have to accept 2 set of entry from the clients
> touch tone phone: first entry would be some unique client code and the
> second entry would be the 10 digits phone number to town B.
> From there the call would be made allowing a bridge to be made
> between the two intended cities.
> I was wondering if anyone knows what it would require technically to
> achieve such thing. I don't even know how many incomming line would
> be required for this project.
> Hope anyone can help.
If you are planning to charge for this service, you will become an
intrastate (assuming A, B, and C are in the same state) long-distance
carrier. You will need to pay for "intrastate special access" lines
for both the incoming and the outgoing lines. You will need to
disable the capability for a caller to make local calls in city C, or
you will have to pay a special access surcharge. You will probably
need to apply to the PUC for a certificate of public convenience and
necessity, you may need to file tariffs, you will need to pay a whole
lot of taxes to the feds and the state/local authorities, and you will
need to file FCC form 499Q quarterly and 499A annually, which will
also obligate you to pay USF charges. And you would become subject to
a variety of state and federal regulations, such as the need to file
annual EEO reports. Of course, you can pass all of these costs
through to your customers, at which point you won't have any, because
the intrastate toll for dialing 10 digits won't be much more than the
charges for using your service, which will require dialing 7 or 10
digits, a customer code, and another 10 digits.
If you don't jump through all the hoops, expect your local phone
company to deny your line requests and/or file an FCC/PUC complaint
for toll diversion and failure to comply with carrier obligations.
If you aren't going to charge for this service, g*d bless you, but why
would you be paying for all the lines and the software and hardware to
do this, just so businesses in the next town could stiff the Bell on
tolls?
Michael D. Sullivan
Bethesda, MD, USA
Delete nospam from my address and it won't work.
Michael D. Sullivan (nospam@camsul.com)