There's no "deal with the telco". The telco (Energis in this case) _own_ the ISP (Planet Online).
And there's nothing new about getting paid money for calls made to 0845 numbers. Anyone who gets themselves a telco licence and who achieves interconnect status with BT can go ahead and invest in lines, a switch, etc. and collect call revenue from BT on calls made by BT customers to those numbers.
The amount received by the telco which owns the numbers are: 0.3155 pence per minute at weekends, 0.7333 pence per minute during weekday, off peak and something like 2 pence per minute during weekday peak times.
I ran a trial of this type of service when I was working for a "new" telco, back in November '97. It was a very successful trial and the idea got adopted in a different form - basically, the telco said to ISPs "We'll carry your call traffic, provide the lines, modems and bandwidth and pay you for the privilege".
This is why big ISPs are worth so much money, even though they have never generated a profit - they get snapped up by telcos like Scottish Telecom and Energis, who then start reaping in tens of thousands of pounds a _day_ in call revenue.
I know this, because I was involved in ultimately unsuccessful negotiations to buy one of the big UK ISPs, and I had the job of figuring out how to get them on the telco's network and how much call revenue would be generated. My calculations came out with over £50,000 per day. And that was being kind of conservative.
I used to laugh at stories a few years ago which said that the Internet was threatening telcos, with voice over IP and so on, because I knew about this whole call revenue thing, and I knew that telcos have barrel-loads of money to spend on acquisitions, whereas your average ISP is lucky if it's managing to break even.
The telcos were always going to end up buying out the ISPs. Either that, of the ISPs were going to become telcos - eg. Easynet. It's only now that people are beginning to realise why.
> x=f(y,z) would be considered pre-existing and therefor not patentable.
I would posit that _all_ mathematical functions pre-exist. Christ, imagine if Einstein had worked for some money-grabbing corp and they patented E-mc^2? Or if patent laws had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. "Sorry, everyone, you can't do long division, because Maths, Inc. has the patent on the algorithm."
Fuck that, my friends. I have no problem with copyright - i.e. if you publish some software, people shouldn't copy it and use it without paying for it - but if someone manages to come up with the same idea by themselves, I don't think they should be prevented from exploiting their idea just because someone else came up with it as well.
You get pissed on five pints of Guinness? Lightweight.
An bhfuil aon duine in ann e seo a dtigmheail?
Wonder what the Gaeilge for "decrypt" is.
The Dodger
PS: Doesn't anyone else find this concept of patenting algorithms just slightly abhorrent? Or are my extreme hacker tendecies ("INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!!!") coming to the fore again?
Methinks that comparing Firewire to Fibre Channel is a bit like comparing Windows and Unix, or modems and ATM. Both have their area of speciality.
I work with high-end enterprise digital asset management systems - unix servers (generally Sun X500s) with RAID online storage(often A5000s) and HP MO jukeboxes providing near-line storage (up to the 1200ex, which stores 1.2 terabytes).
Sun's A5000s are FCAL devices and until something better than FCAL comes along, I'm not switching. From what I've seen, Firewire isn't better; it's just had good PR.
Anyway, everyone seems to have forgotten that both Fibre Channel and IEEE P1394 are part of the SCSI-3 standard.:)
Slashdot Mirror
> get linux-2.2.0.tar.gz
Receiving file: linux-2.2.0.tar.gz
100% 0 ==========================================> 13080195 bytes. ETA: 0:00
linux-2.2.0.tar.gz: 13080195 bytes received in 1984.30 seconds, 6.44 kB/s.
666K kernels. 1984 seconds to download. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Dodge
There's no "deal with the telco". The telco (Energis in this case) _own_ the ISP (Planet Online).
And there's nothing new about getting paid money for calls made to 0845 numbers. Anyone who gets themselves a telco licence and who achieves interconnect status with BT can go ahead and invest in lines, a switch, etc. and collect call revenue from BT on calls made by BT customers to those numbers.
The amount received by the telco which owns the numbers are: 0.3155 pence per minute at weekends, 0.7333 pence per minute during weekday, off peak and something like 2 pence per minute during weekday peak times.
I ran a trial of this type of service when I was working for a "new" telco, back in November '97. It was a very successful trial and the idea got adopted in a different form - basically, the telco said to ISPs "We'll carry your call traffic, provide the lines, modems and bandwidth and pay you for the privilege".
This is why big ISPs are worth so much money, even though they have never generated a profit - they get snapped up by telcos like Scottish Telecom and Energis, who then start reaping in tens of thousands of pounds a _day_ in call revenue.
I know this, because I was involved in ultimately unsuccessful negotiations to buy one of the big UK ISPs, and I had the job of figuring out how to get them on the telco's network and how much call revenue would be generated. My calculations came out with over £50,000 per day. And that was being kind of conservative.
I used to laugh at stories a few years ago which said that the Internet was threatening telcos, with voice over IP and so on, because I knew about this whole call revenue thing, and I knew that telcos have barrel-loads of money to spend on acquisitions, whereas your average ISP is lucky if it's managing to break even.
The telcos were always going to end up buying out the ISPs. Either that, of the ISPs were going to become telcos - eg. Easynet. It's only now that people are beginning to realise why.
The Dodger
Will they pay for flights, accomodation, dancing girls, etc? :)
Dodge
> x=f(y,z) would be considered pre-existing and therefor not patentable.
I would posit that _all_ mathematical functions pre-exist. Christ, imagine if Einstein had worked for some money-grabbing corp and they patented E-mc^2? Or if patent laws had existed in ancient Greece or Rome. "Sorry, everyone, you can't do long division, because Maths, Inc. has the patent on the algorithm."
Fuck that, my friends. I have no problem with copyright - i.e. if you publish some software, people shouldn't copy it and use it without paying for it - but if someone manages to come up with the same idea by themselves, I don't think they should be prevented from exploiting their idea just because someone else came up with it as well.
Dodge
You get pissed on five pints of Guinness? Lightweight.
An bhfuil aon duine in ann e seo a dtigmheail?
Wonder what the Gaeilge for "decrypt" is.
The Dodger
PS: Doesn't anyone else find this concept of patenting algorithms just slightly abhorrent? Or are my extreme hacker tendecies ("INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE!!!") coming to the fore again?
Methinks that comparing Firewire to Fibre Channel is a bit like comparing Windows and Unix, or modems and ATM. Both have their area of speciality.
:)
I work with high-end enterprise digital asset management systems - unix servers (generally Sun X500s) with RAID online storage(often A5000s) and HP MO jukeboxes providing near-line storage (up to the 1200ex, which stores 1.2 terabytes).
Sun's A5000s are FCAL devices and until something better than FCAL comes along, I'm not switching. From what I've seen, Firewire isn't better; it's just had good PR.
Anyway, everyone seems to have forgotten that both Fibre Channel and IEEE P1394 are part of the SCSI-3 standard.
Dodger