I am glad and thankful that Pat has kept this group going when so many Usenet lists/discussions have disappeared. These Telecommunications Risk's/Problem's questions arose out of an Washington, DC and George Washington University (GWU) sponsored ACM meeting on Computer Security with former AT&T/Bell Labs Steve Bellovin, that became heated Telecommunications arguments at a local bar. It turns out that Steve was one of the original developers and advocates of Usenet.
This long-line repairman, and a pretty girl from the Commerce Department, mentioned that you can get very cheap VOIP service from Latin American and Caribbean countries, such as Venezuela?, because their Internet Voice, Voice over IP (VOIP) implementations are not setup for, and bypasses the various Tariffs, Taxes, and Fee's associated with the normal PTT Telephone service?
I am sure that this has been brought up before on this group?
And this is one of the reasons that European PTT's have insisted on keeping their X.25 Networks as front ends into the conventional Internet. X.25 has various fields for carrier usage charging of Tariffs, Taxes, and Fee's.
(VOIP is difficult to understand, maintain, and troubleshoot because telephony technology and terminology is morphed into a the arcane TCP/ IP, i.e. the telephone number becomes a series of IP addresses.)
Robert J. Perillo Principal Telecommunications Engineer dockmaster snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com