TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: Re: Young Cell Users Rack Up Debt, One Dime Message at a Time

Re: Young Cell Users Rack Up Debt, One Dime Message at a Time

John Levine (johnl@iecc.com)
15 Jan 2005 21:50:35 -0000

> Yes, our geographical area codes all begin with 01 or 02, whereas
> mobile prefixes and prefixes for personal numbers begin with 07.

We had another whole issue about numbering. Phone numbers in North
America are in a fixed format which can't be changed without upgrading
every phone switch on the continent. The format is NXX-NXX-XXXX where
the first three digits are known as an area code and designate a part
of the country. Area codes can be as large as an entire state, for
less populated states, or as small as part of downtown Los Angeles.
If calls to cell phones were going to cost extra, they'd have to be
placed in separate area codes to make the billing work, and we didn't
have enough unused area codes to overlay the entire country in any
reasonable way. So we didn't.

In the long run, the US scheme has the major advantage of removing
artificial distinctions between kinds of service, so we have direct
competition between fixed and mobile that's unlikely to happen in
Europe so long as it costs five times as much to call a local mobile
as a local landline.

> Fortunately, the phone package that I'm on means that I don't pay
> for *ANY* calls to landlines in the UK, both locally and nationally,
> but I do have to pay for calls to mobiles, at a rate of anything up
> to 19p or 2/minute,

My phone package lets me call any phone in the US, fixed or mobile,
for free up to the number of minutes per month in my package, which is
more than I ever use.

Regards,

John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
http://www.taugh.com

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