Chad!!! Girlfriend!!! where have you been!!! Had my blonde moments not got the better of me I would have, but thank god some man here gave out my phone number and I made enough money to pay it off LOL
update>>straight from the fcc. local number portability does integrate a plan to keep your phone number, no matter where you move. it won’t be fully effective until about 2010 a.d… at this point you can keep the phone number only in certain geographical (not exactly, but for point of discussion) area.
the fcc doesn’t bother telling you about it b/c it knows how easily the sheep get confused, and it’s still aways out.
manhattan, i’m surpised at you. Hey , everybody, manhattan believes the government, nanny nanny boo boo.
I completely forgot about this thread until it showed up near the top again. I had thought the Teemsters would all be able to figure out my comments, and it does appear that most of you haven’t had a problem doing so, but to clarify for the record:
tomndebb is absolutely right about how I had intended it to be read. “Apres moi, le deluge.” (or is it la?) It’s not a new concept. I still can’t quite fathom how someone could have thought it meant anything other than that, but there you have it.
I don’t have anything against the Gray Panthers personally either individually or collectively; I had never even HEARD of them before this thread. I do consider their position on overlays… as I understand it, and I realize that my understanding of that position comes from the same person who thought I wanted them to all die… to be misguided.
And I think… I -hope- … that The LION realized I was joking about printers, also. In fact, the specific example I had in mind of a small businessman I know who had had to redo all his printed material owns a print shop. I don’t think he’s much if any happier about it than any other small business owner; there may be some additional jobs as a result, but not likely much… the time between when the split is announced and when permissive dialing ends is long enough that many business can probably use up their old letterhead during that time anyway.
The estimate of 2010 or thereabouts for true number portability sounds reasonable based on what I’ve heard.
I fully expect the same people who don’t like overlays to not like number portability either (“What do you mean it’s a long distance call? The first six digits of his number are the same as the first six digits of mine! How can that be long distance?” and “What do you mean I have to dial ten digits to call my friend? He lives in the same building! How can that be a different area code?”).
It bugs me a little bit that the phone companies get ten years to make number portability really truly work, but that we have to pay for it NOW. I understand why, but it still bothers me.
By the by:
Johnny-come-latelies, all of them.
Torquemada
Two stupid questions:
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Why do we get charged extra for long distance phone calls anyway? Aren’t the lines already up?
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Who the hell are the Panthers anyway? Note: THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT I WISH THEY WERE IN HELL. OR HEAVEN. I DO NOT WISH THEM DEAD.
Forgive my ignorance, but I’ll have to ditto PunditLisa’s question… What/who the heck are the Grey Panthers? Is this a word for the FCC or some such?
Hmmph…and I thought I was down with the lingo. Please enlighten me.
Even if someone gave you outright the entire existing long distance infrastructure, you’d still have to charge for its use to pay the salaries of the people who keep it running and to pay for the electricity you use. Presumably you’d want a bit for your trouble also, and if you had stockholders they might like a bone or two.
In 2001 (or maybe 2010) Clarke mentions “the historic abolition of all long-distance charges” on January 1, 2001 (or possibly 2000; I forget which). Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, though compared to what people were paying twenty or thirty years ago they’re almost free.
The Gray Panthers are primarily older concerned citizens. (My friend the retired librarian is 81, but I myself am 50.) The organization looks out for citizens’ rights in dealing with government agencies and corporations. And–this is covered in the Great Debates forum under “The Bible vis-a-vis churches’ representations of it”–Catholic organizations are almost literally buying up hospitals, making needed health care unavailable or difficult for many people who can ill afford such change. And
in point of fact the Panthers’ literature has criticized the FCC for the block allocations, of 10,000 phone numbers each, to carriers within one area code, so I seriously doubt the the Gray Panthers ‘are the FCC’ as suggested above.
metroshane sez:
Accusing someone of believing the government? Now that’s low.
Actually, I believe the FCC slightly more than most other gummit agencies, which is to say only slightly more than zero. I’m an investor in telecommunications companies, and I’ve not heard of this development outside of a few working groups that no one that I know of has taken seriously. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, which enables the FCC on this issue, defines local number portability as being site-specific, but is a little (hah!) less clear on service provider portability. If you have a link or other source, I’d certainly appreciate it. It would not be the first time FCC has moved beyond its legal mandate. It would also explain some of the more mysterious portions of the GTE/SBC challenge to number portability rules.
As I alluded to in an earlier post, the proposed wireless rules are different. I’m looking for a link, but in short they look a lot like what you say are the proposed 2010 rules for local wired numbers (which would make your firm and others have to do almost as much switch reprogramming as for wired, with the exception IIRC that wireless rules allow an off-switch database query, whereas wired numbers must be on-switch).
And as regards your concerns about “speaking for GTE,” worry not my friend. I think everybody (Well OK, almost everybody) on the board realizes that each of us speaks only for ourselves. Lord knows I do. I likewise speak only for me.
punditlisa asks a prescient question about long distance. Well, LD companies gotta make a few bucks too! As it happens, the “death of time” in LD may be coming almost as soon as Clarke forsaw (thanks, torq!). As you know, the “death of distance” came a few years ago, so within a national border a LD across the country costs exactly as much to a call immediately outside your local calling area. As LD time charges continue to come down, you are likely to see minutes priced in “buckets” (like cellular minutes) and eventually a single monthly charge for all the LD calls your little heart cares to make (up to a large limit).
As you correctly guessed, the marginal cost of carrying a minute of traffic on a large, built LD network is quite close to zero. The two largest marginal cash costs LD companies have are 1) picking up and dropping off calls to local networks (which costs are coming down from about 40% of revenues or so) and 2) running ads and writing bounty checks to get you to switch to them (which costs are going up as competition increases).
Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine