An article in the Addison County Independent talks about how rural phone customers suffer because long distance carriers will drop or misroute calls rather than pay the higher termination fees associated with rural providers.
john-
In this case, it's just what the article says, it's sleazy long distance companies accidentally on purpose dropping calls with high termination fees. The phone company they mention, Shoreham Telephone, was until recently family owned (my relatives sold it to a larger independent) and has the usual termination fees for rural LECs.
The abuses you're remembering were some tiny rural phone coops in the midwest that let third parties install conference bridges and dialaround services to call China, thereby driving up their inbound minutes to the point that AT&T's termination fees went from about $20K/yr to over $1 million, which they refused to pay. That's not what's going on here, the calls are real calls to local subscribers.
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