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Least-Cost Routing Threatens Rural Phone Call Completion
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.'"
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.
Traffic pumping is/was a practice that essentially let rural US phone companies suck money directly out of large carriers bank accounts. The various regulations in place over the telecom industry meant that companies like AT&T couldn't do anything to stop it.
If the telecom industry had not been regulated, people who lived in rural areas would have have gotten phone service. One might rationally argue along the lines of "Too damned bad. Move to town, ya hick.", but most people would not. The phone service is a utility, a vital one. As such the phone company was granted certain benefits (rights of way for the stringing and later, burying, of cable, for example). In exchange it agreed to wire rural areas. There's more involved than just that, but you get the idea. Without regulation, things would have been a mess, with consumers held hostage. Regulation can fix this scenario too. It's complicated though. You can't just telll the LD carriers "you must complete this call" if doing so costs them more than they charge. Likewise, the small rural phone companies must receive enough revenue to maintain their operation. And of course, wireless muddies things even further. The only way this is going to get fixed is if sane regulation is brought to bear.
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!
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.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
"the telcos have no obligation to lose money servicing a handful of remote locations"
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."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.
Just checking... Not relevant to the rest of the world eh.
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.
The little local companies that completed the calls were getting astronomical call termination rates. They milked the cow until it was dry.
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!
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.
----- obSig
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
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.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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 would be less profitable). There'd be a lot of accountability in the system by default, as one company would be in control of all aspects of the call. If something broke, the customer had one number to call (hey, maybe make it an easy to dial number like 611 or something!), regardless of whether the problem was with their instrument, their local loop, or a trunking problem on the long distance lines. We'd need, of course, to regulate this company to ensure that they don't use their monopoly power excessively. But the upside is, this company could be (in effect) a research and development powerhouse. Who knows. This company might even do something radical like invent microelectronics as we know it, or create a powerful operating system that everybody emulates.
Wait.
last I checked I paid them for the food I eat. They don't pay my city taxes to get things like government and industry, so they should pay me or go without things like government and college educations for their children.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
... least cost long distance provider decides that the pay is not enough to cover the costs and render a large enough profit...
FTFY
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Last time I checked, people in cities paid for all of that.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
Dilbert RSS feed
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 L3 doesn't route calls back to BFE because they deem the route cost too high.
There are two appropriate solutions:
1. Verizon eats the higher cost of the route. They "lose" money and won;t do that.
2. Verizon passes the higher charges onto the customer. That's "hard" and since the customer is on a "Free Nationwide Long Distance Plan" they are likely to take issue if Verizon charges them extra.
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 services at retail rates, one farm at a time, or wholesale rates, through some sort of organization?
So are they going to PAY for the service? The real price, not the subsidized cost. No?
Thought so.
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 related work in my state) tasks that can't be done in a city.
The real problem is that long distance providers often don't want to even work with us on the issue. We can call up CenturyLink, for example, and they will tell us that they're unable to work with us directly. We have to tell person A, who initiated the call that person B was unable to receive and is complaining about, that they need to complain to CenturyLink. The person who initiates the call that did not go through properly has to initiate the complaint. And why would they do that, since they're able to call everyone else without issue? Clearly person B has an issue with their service.
In short, it's a giant cluster-f. I'm tired of having to tell people who pay money for their service that some larger telecom can't get its sh*t together. Meanwhile, we check every copper line from the CO to the customer sometimes because we want to give the benefit of the doubt and ensure the customer isn't having another issue, and it comes down to call completion problems. Honestly, I think the FCC should be forcing long distance carriers to pay for the time wasted due to their incompetence. The issue would get fixed a lot faster that way.
Like, um, duh?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
Dilbert RSS feed
I have a suspicion that if everyone had to do that, many people would be in for a nasty surprise.
Ezekiel 23:20
Haven't the telcos ever heard of "Lowest Cost Spanning Trees?". This is what's done in internet routers to prevent exactly the kinds of infinite loops causing the problems there. Spanning trees still provide the carriers with the best available pricing for a given set of call end points over the available routers, but also ensure that infinite loops don't occur within the network, thus providing proper connectivity to the end user.
Nice people. They try hard. But. Their services are overpriced and not reliable. You are forced into a landline, like it or not, to get dsl. (that landline runs 17.50 plus about 7.50 in FCC garbage which is pretty much what Verizoff charges in other locations). The DSL service is marginal. What is described as 'up to 6 Mbps' is in fact.. (for me) below 3 as the data transmission is unreliable faster than that. Their cable service is.. dreadful? Often goes out of service for long periods. While we all understand the economics of remote/rural telecoms, people should also keep in mind that Waitsfield Telecom has actively fought to keep other providers out of our service area. They could have competition but they have made sure they do not have it. The years of nobody else wanting to try to serve our area are gone over but as customers, we are denied those choices becasue it would likely mean the wend of Waitsfield Telecom.
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.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
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!
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!!"
Dilbert RSS feed
I know I'm showing my age, but I really miss toll quality calls. You know, the polar opposite of the typical...hello....it'sssss bbbsx ... ble b. sors and then....s t boob bleeep blorp.
So we'll meet then. bye....click
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 (some of) the other providers do everything in their power to avoid that cost, including dropping expensive calls on the floor or degrading quality, in the hope that the caller will either switch to a cell phone or that the two ends will decide to reestablish the call in the other direction. Incoming calls are practically always profitable.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Long distance providers are extremely competitive, I cannot see them dropping a call they would make even 0.1 cent on.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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.
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 should be made to lose money providing a service. They should be allowed to charge a bit more for that call, informing the caller beforehand that it will cost a penny or two more per minute for this call, allowing them to terminate if they wish. This will, of course, have to be watched, otherwise you'll have the phone companys adding on a charge even when it wouldn't over-cost them.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
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 the community ponies up their dues when the main water pump dies. So they borrow money, usually at usurious rates, and externalize the profit to the banks.
Its a myth that co-ops don't seek profits. They do, but not for themselves or the membership, they just hand all profits to some one else.
There is nothing wrong with making money on water utilities, It guarantees there will be interest and funds available to keep the system up to standards, expand as needed, pay the initial investors, and generally take care of business.
Don't fear profit. Doing so is simplistic and short sighted.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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. Government-run granaries have solved that problem for thousands of years.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
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).
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 are.
Offsetting higher operational costs, including salary, are certainly a central part of those goals.
Quoting linked article:
advance the availability of such services to all consumers, including those in low income, rural, insular, and high cost areas at rates that are reasonably comparable to those charged in urban areas
Profit is merely one component of costs. Its the cost of borrowing money. The fund was never envisioned as only providing initial investment for infrastructure. It Always had the goal of supporting operational costs.
As for your idea of charging a bit more for calls into such regions, NO, this was a conscious decision that we as a society made when the USF was set up. We chose, wisely or unwisely, to level the playing field with respect to communications cost. Undoing that now would return us to the 1940's where the cost of a call to a town 40 miles away could exceed the cost of a call across country. What we have now allows local and long distance prices to be so cheap that its not worth the phone company even billing for it any more.
In a perfectly free market driven society, differing fees would be the normal expectation. But telephone services, rural electrification, water, sewer, have never lent themselves to a competitive free market model. (Even if they did, nobody wants six water companies and four phone companies trenching through neighborhoods simply to provide competition.) We, as a society, devised other means to substitute for the lack of competition as a means of regulating profit. Public Utility Commissions are the result where pure market economics don't quite fit easily.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
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.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
True, but why would a long distance provider have limited capacity?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Except that no they don't. They think they do, but tax money almost always flows from the urban areas out to the rural ones. Rural infrastructure costs more per capita.
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.
The same reason your internet connection has a limited capacity. It's called "reality". It starts with Shannon's theorem.
Well put.
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 the cost of traffic.
The more expensive carriers can hit limits because they expect more from it and therefore buy more expensive guaranteed capacity. However, they also have much higher margins so they can afford to upgrade.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Everything old is new again. 100 years ago give or take these rural phone companies were born out of the fact that these towns were "forgotten" by the growing carriers. Seems to be history repeating itself in that they get the sloppy seconds.
Agreed. This is hardly the first time that the phone system has had a dumb regulator-imposed pricing system imposed. Often they're lobbied for by phone companies leveraging for an advantage, and sometimes it backfires. In this case rural companies diminish the value of their service by getting the ability to charge more to terminate calls, thus causing other companies to refuse to do business with them.
A previous example that comes to mind also involved termination fees - when competitive local carriers started to take off the big phone companies lobbied for the ability to charge to terminate local calls, figuring that since they had most of the numbers they'd collect most of the fees. Then competitive companies started contracting with ISPs to give really cheap incoming-only lines for modem banks, and started billing the major carriers for tons of fees.
It seems like passing along costs is the fairest option. Either let rural consumers pay more to bear the costs, or let those calling them pay more to reach them.
This example seems a bit fishy. Even the local telco can't call their customer, so in this case its just because they aren't answering their phone, not due to routing issues.
Isn't this USF kinda the same idea as the US Postal Service getting a monopoly on mail delivery?
The whole point is to prevent a business from milking the cheap spots and leaving the rural areas out in the cold.
Considering abusive monopoly practices I would love for the phone system to be nationalized just like the mail.
The problem lies with Verizon and AT&T. I speak from a decade of experience working for carriers. Verizon, AT&T and other behemoths actively discriminate against small carriers, by enforcing several policies that make it impossible for them to purchase direct routes. Logic says that a straight line is the shortest path, but in the current state of telephony, it's sometimes prohibitively expensive.
Things Verizon requests for an interconnect:
- Lots of traffic. The prepaids are huge, that alone eliminates over 75% of all carriers.
- Proprietary bias. They prefer H.323 and other obsolete technologies. Their H.323 implementation (up to and including codecs) is designed to work mostly with cisco, and is not very asterisk-friendly.
- If you request SIP as a more rational approach to interconnection, sales will screw with you for weeks. When you finally manage to get authorization for a SIP interconnect, they notify you the traffic quota for SIP is even higher, requiring an increase in the monthly prepaid. Then they just send you an example cisco configuration and a few doc files with misleading information.
- Then the bureaucracy starts. If you aren't connecting with cisco equipment, and you aren't prepaying shitloads of traffic, they'll drive you insane with red tape.
- When you go through the cisco file you end up understanding what you need to interconnect with them:
- They will send and accept traffic from ONLY ONE IP, through an IPSec tunnel. If you require additional IPs, it'll mean another interconnection, and it'll cost you. And, yes, that's right, you have to send your SIP signalling through an IPSec tunnel, then reinvite all media. But they'll only accept reinvites to pre-defined hosts (up to 8), so you can't reinvite traffic directly to your customers, and therefore you must afford all the extra bandwidth costs associated.
- Of course, getting such a setup to work will require some testing and debugging, which will be extremely hard as their support department refuses to work with you or give you any feedback if you aren't using cisco/nortel/netgear etc. If you are using FOSS, you are SOL.
- Finally, going through all this steps will take anywhere from 45 to 90 days.
- Let's say you need to migrate one of your server (common in 99% of all carriers, since they don't own a fucking datacenter, and they collocate their equipment). Or you need to add a new one. Adding a new server will take at least 30 days. Just changing the IP address of one of your servers will take ~15 days.
- Even after you've got everything working, they'll do stuff such as sending you an email saying they'll discontinue the platform you are working on in 15 days, and you need to migrate. Or you need to stop using a particular codec. Or you need to change some other arbitrary thing. That'll, again, make you loose traffic, and therefore money.
AT&T, BT, and all other industry behemoths have similar practices. Some will even force you to collocate equipment at their locations. This means It's extremely expensive for small carriers to purchase directly from them. So they buy from other carriers. But again, this other carriers are still too small to purchase directly from the actual Tier-1 bastards, so they purchase from somebody else too. In the end, It's cheaper to buy from some small provider that is still bigger that still has 2 or 3 hops before getting to the big guys than purchasing directly from them. That is Verizon's fault.
So, yeah, you end up purchasing from some carrier with huge latency, and poor peering, but he offers you a simple IAX2 trunk right away, you can send traffic from any IP, you can just call support, and there are no traffic quotas. You can just prepay through paypal as you go. And that's better than having to deal with verizon.
This is just one of many reasons why I don't work on telephony anymore, and one of the reasons I try to call PSTN lines as little as possible.
This guys are hypocrites, blaming others when they are the only ones to blame.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
So the free market is what we need for food but food cannot be left entirely to the free market?!?
So what say you abiout the copper? Shall I be expecting rent from Ma Bell or shall I be selling some copper?
You shouldn't expect anything because I don't make public policy, less alone in your country. But if they're using your land to connect other people, I don't see why you shouldn't get some benefits from it if you want to, like a discount on your fees.
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We need to distort the market enough that people do not starve when the harvest fails one year. We do not need to pay people living in rural areas for making phone calls -- that makes farmers who happen to make phone calls more competitive with farmers who don't, and there is no guarantee that the farmers who make more phone calls are the ones who produce the most needed products.
Which is what I wrote already.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
My point is that the phone companies cannot claim they are not getting anything in return for their obligation to provide universal service.
As for compensating individuals, they would need to negotiate each case separately and would have to pay actual money (since a property owner might not opt for phone service). The net result is that we would have never developed a telephone network, electrical grid, or internet.
Interestingly, farmers being able to communicate easily and cheaply is closely tied with gathering and disseminating the information needed to predict and sometimes avoid crop failures.
It is notable that without distortions to the market, telephone service would only exist in urban areas and it might or might not be possible to call someone long distance at all. It would be necessary to have more than one phone since some networks wouldn't talk to others.
I'm wondering what the cost of food would be if this tax flow didn't happen.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The cost of telecommunications is completely trivial today compared to the value of crops. Satellite service can fulfil that need.
The topic of article is that it is "necessary to have more than one phone since some networks [won't] talk to others."
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
If it's that dirt cheap, why do people get so burned up about subsidizing it?
I never said it is dirt cheap, I said the cost is trivial compared to the value of crops.
The subsidy is not specific to communication related to "gathering and disseminating the information needed to predict and sometimes avoid crop failures."
If it is necessary for the functioning of society that farmers have phone lines, then by all means run a government bid to provide phone service to farmers. Or start a government phone company to provide the service. Or nationalise the telecoms backbone or send in the USACE, if that is what it takes. I am a leftist, Big Government doesn't scare me. But either way, do it properly, get the money for the project in through taxes and give the money out through the budget so it is plain for all to see what is going on. Hiding taxes and subsidies on phone bills is just lying to people, it prevents reasoned discussion of the costs and benefits, and it causes just the kind of weird results that this article talked about.
Even if done right, I would still most likely be against the subsidy, but all it would take to convince me would be a few proper scientific studies.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Err isn't the entire point of the subsidized cost to make it affordable in rural areas?
Credit Unions are another obvious example.
But you have to admit, You are also in the distinct minority.
As I said, "Cooperatives generally don't make a good business model,".
That you can find an example of some that do only proves the rule.
It is still unusual to find the co-op model in vary many medium to large scale industrial undertakings.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The price would more accurately reflect the cost. People would make different choices.
Pretty much what I had in mind, tho I do wonder how much of a change it would really cause. Only about 5 cents a pound more would make meat and milk production reasonably profitable, rather than their present marginal profit. So... likely wholesale food prices would go up, but not by much, if this tax flow went away.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The rural company has it's hands tied by the US Government to offer a certain quality of service for a reasonable price. A big part of the problem is that some of the least cost routing companies are illegally routing the more expensive intrastate (within the state) long distance calls out of state, and creating new interstate calls using VoIP. The interstate calls are governed by the Federal government and have to be billed at a lower rate. There's enough evidence to see that it's happening but enough for a court case, and very few companies can do the data analysis, even if they had the data.
Further complicating the issue, most places the rural companies are connecting up to equipment owned by the big players, who are the ones profiting from the lawbreaking least cost routing companies. The one or two states where it's owned collectively by the rural companies, the public utilities commission and whoever else would be involved, don't care enough to pursue the issue.
A lot of rural phone companies have gotten government subsidies to build out broadband service. It may not be available in the boonies yet, but the nearby villages have it. The goal is to get broadband to everyone eventually (government's version of ASAP), so we can get rid of the old, expensive behemoth of the telephone network. Paying to run room size computer/electronic systems to route calls for 1000 people seems a little foolish in 2012, when the possible traffic would fit on a 100Mbit duplex ethernet. You can also run VoIP using 3G broadband, where available. I've never tried on anything slower, but 2.5G well exceeds the 8kbps (each direction) that VoIP can be compressed to, as does good dial-up.
Fixed line broadband penetration map from end of 2010: http://virulentwordofmouse.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/broadband-us-map2.jpg
Universal connectivity is, in itself, a value for society. I would support community ownership of the network (but would permit competing systems). Given the current political allergy to government actually providing public services, that seems difficult to accomplish. Given that, the subsidy is probably better than not doing anything.
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.
Not necessarily. I was in a small town (~500 pop.) in the middle of nowhere not long ago, where the local telco provides 15Mbps synchronous 'fiber-to-the-farm' for cheaper than my metro-area 6/1.5 cable. I'm jealous.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.