You can blame our own Federal Communications Commission for caving-in
> to payphone owners and others involved in the industry for raising
> the limit on these surcharges.
Yes. In a few areas I see payphone providers with a few grains of sense who are pricing their calls to be competitive, e.g., 10 cpm for a lot of international calls on VZ phones in New York. The rest are in a suicidal circle of higher prices leading to less use leading to yet higher prices.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But I have to wonder what was wrong
> with the old 'Separations and Settlements' process AT&T used for > about ninety years.
Nothing, so long as all the pay phones belonged to the ILEC and the long distance rates were high enough to pay for a lot of manual work. In a world where there's thousands of COCOT owners and the real cpm for domestic calls is a penny a minute, it's a problem.
R's,
John
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There was a fellow when I lived in Chicago, who owned a bunch of COCOTS and he deliberatly priced his _less_ than Ameritech. When Ameritech went to 30 cents per call several years ago, he put signs on all his COCOTS saying 'this phone still just 25 cents" and he offered long distance to anywhere for just _one dollar_ for 3 minutes and some small amount of overtime, I think maybe 10 seconds. He really raked in money on those phones of his. PAT]