[geeks] Vonage alternative?

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>Date: 2007/04/17 Tue PM 01:29:14 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Vonage alternative?

>Tue, 17 Apr 2007 @ 09:38 -0700, Sheldon T. Hall said:
>
>> is always a toll-free call.  Having grown up with that, when I moved to
>> California I was amazed to find that anything over 12 miles was a long
>> distance call.
>
>In Tidewater, Virginia it used to be worse than that.
>
>I could stand on a street and *see* the person I was calling, and it
>would be long distance. There were places where a 1 mile call was long
>distance.
>
>A few years back they finally merged the whole area into one zone.

That isn't that unusual, the nation is actually broken up into LATAs (the meaning of which escapes me at the moment), suffice to say they were small service areas that defined "local" calls (intra-LATA). Calls outside your LATA, but in side your state were one class of Long Distance calling (inter-LATA), and then there was state-to-state calling.

The thing that changed all this was when the RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies, the "baby bells") were allowed to enter the long distance market - it gave them the ability to lump all calls into category (essentially) and bill as they like. Prior to offering long distance, they had to hand off long distance calls to a third-party to be handled.

Lionel