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FCC Tariff Changes Mean No More Free Conference Calls
kgeiger writes "The FCC is changing the call termination tariffs that subsidized rural wireline service and coincidentally free conference calls. Free conference call services had located their dial-in centers in rural areas to scoop up FCC tariffs from its Universal Service Fund. USF monies will go to broadband deployment instead. Be prepared to put more nickels in the box." On the other hand, maybe ad-driven Internet services (whether free or "freemium") will step in to the free-conference gap with some good-enough options, as they have for many other services, like email and faxing.
With the amount of email I get from free internet conference call providers, I am sure they will have no problem telling me about it for months.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I remember them. Back in the old days.
Get off my lawn, kid!
Have gnu, will travel.
You mean, the funds will go to the same bullshit fund that subsidized telcos to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars to expand high-speed infrastructure and reach, which they then pocketed and did nothing with? Fuck you.
Inb4 know-it-alls.
Use skype, voip conf calls or mumble you idiots.
Just locate your free conference call center and China and fund it by spying on the meetings and selling corporate secrets to the highest bidder. Everybody's happy, problem solved!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Sadly, the IEEE did not do its research when publishing this blatant promotion for Speek.
The free conference companies absolutely do NOT receive money from the Universal Service Fund, either directly or indirectly. In fact, they collect taxes from end users that contribute to this fund.
Free conference companies make money indirectly from access fees, which are paid to the rural telephone company via tariffs, the very mechanism that underpins our entire public switched telephone network. There is nothing nefarious, or even remotely illegal about this. In fact, in its recent ruling the FCC made it explicitly clear that this practice is legitimate.
The term “traffic pumping” is used by companies that compete with the free conference providers to attempt to put this practice in a negative light. In fact, anyone that hopes to receive a telephone call (e.g. almost every business that has a telephone number) engages in “traffic pumping”.
Who is opposed to the free conference providers? The long distance companies (who operate their own high-cost conference services), Speek (who offers a competing service), and anyone else who charges more money for less service. The simple fact is that if the free conference services have successfully commoditized what was once a high cost service.
...as long as you're eating on the government's dime.
I mean, seriously? How long have these services been running (and, by the way, making money for the providers) operating "for free" by taking government subsidy dollars that were clearly not intended for this service?
Better title: "FCC finally gets off it's a** and closes a heavily exploited loophole."
I don't even have POTS and it isn't even available in my building (we have fiber only with optional IP phone service). I wouldn't even know how to hold a conference call over standrad phone service. For video conferencing we've switched to good webcams and Google Hangout. Skype is fine for voice. There are more VOIP providers than there are species of fish. Seriously, if you're so outdated you shouldn't be making conference calls in the first places.
No more government subsidy for calls received == a shortfall for Verizon == they will raise my rates. Oh well. The USF is probably better-diverted to the hookup of rural internet anyway.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
That's fine with me. I don't believe I have ever made a conference telephone call.
The way termination fees used to work was that you paid your long distance carrier 10 cents a minute for a long distance phone call. The LD carrier shared that ten cents with the local phone companies on both sides of the call. The shared amount vary but a penny to each side was a common amount. The FCC granted a abnormally high fee to rural telephone companies of about five cents a minute. A call from a big city to the country was split 1 cent to the big city telco, 4 cents to the long distance carrier, and 5 cents to the rural telco. The long distance companies didn't make as much money on a call to or from a rural phone company but the amount of traffic was small.
There was also a termination fee for local calls, but it was much less than a penny. Various companies began to "exploit" the termination fees. The guys with lots of modems were some of the first (e.g. whoever AOL outsourced their modems to). The free conference guys figured out you could make good money as well. Remember that conference call companies charged 25 cents a minute, so it was cheaper to pay 10 cents a minute for a long distance call to a free conference service. If they were efficient, they could even make money at 1 cent per minute, but 5 cents was much better so they located in rural areas.
The large telcos started to change their models for long distance from per-minute to a block of minutes (e.g. 500 minutes for $$ per month). The local telcos mostly took over the long distance business so now the telcos were cutting checks to the free conference guys and not getting anything back. Telcos hate that. So they stopped paying or arbitrarily started paying 50 cents on the dollar. They also lobbied to change the rules. And here we are with the FCC tariff change.
(Universal Service Fees are different. They are one of many taxes on your phone bill. The taxes are used to subsidize the phone bills for the "poor".)
I do not run a free conference service (or free anything), but the death star and friends owe me about $50k and I'm very very small.
In the 1990s, when Internet access from homes was mostly by dial-up, those lucrative âoetermination fees,â as theyâ(TM)re called, led to a proliferation of Internet service providers
This claim is dubious, to put it mildly. The termination fees were paid to the terminating telephone company. The ISP had nothing to do with it. In some cases this may have allowed CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers) to provide slightly lower rates to independent ISPs, but that is hardly the sort of thing that would lead to a proliferation of ISPs by itself.
The real reason for the proliferation of ISPs is that the phone companies themselves dragged their feet as long as possible on providing anything other than ordinary dialup service. ISP startup costs were relatively low, demand was very high, and at the time ISP service came with all sorts of value added features to allow ISPs to distinguish themselves from their competition.
In addition, if the FCC didn't wildly misread the Communications Act of 1934 at the prompting of the phone companies, there would still be a large number of independent ISPs. Internet access is not an information service, it is a telecommunications service.
...except for the part where some rural LEC's are allowed to charge an order of magnitude or more for the access fee than the rest of local carriers, and are gouging everyone else for the "free" conference calls, that don't require the extended infrastructure, the larger access fees were designed to accommodate.
Who, specifically, are you shilling for.
The USF has yet to help my family secure a simple POTS line.
Eight years ago, we moved to an sparsely populated area, for reasons that are not germane to this discussion.
When we (because of health worries) asked the ILEC for an estimate to provide POTS to our residence, I was given an estimate of US$250k to $275k for a line. I (jokingly) said, "Bring three. They're small."
Cell phone signals are very *iffy* here, even though we spent US$2k for a commercial repeater.
HughesNet is a joke, too. It is unreliable, and doesn't meet any reasonable definition of "high speed". I am always *happy* when I can get/keep a connection to the 'net.
I smell InterCall's Senatorial flunky Saxby Chamblis behind the FCC rules change.
People still use the calling features of phones?
You are wrong.
Every IXC has entered into commercial traffic exchange desls with the rural lec's you mention. In all scenarios, the access fees match those of the most commoditized metro areas.
I don't even have a POTS connection.