[geeks] International calling question

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

On Wed, Oct 01, 2008 at 02:11:36PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:


Thanks,

>Depends.  Does it affect your outdial rates?  

No. It's "flat rate" (aka unlimited) anywhere in the U.S. and Canada. 

> Do the people who'll be
>calling you pay area-code-blind rates or not?  

Most are, and the ones that call could easily ask us to call them back
if they did not. It's for personal, not business use.

> Does it spell something
>neat when combined with the number? :)

That's a possibility, but most of the cheap plans don't let you pick a 
number. The short time in my life I was in the right place for it 382-5968
was taken :-( Now I don't care anyway.


>> Do people think it is, even if it is not?
>
>As someone who did a good deal of growing up back when long distance
>was expensive enough to care about, I still have a lingering feeling in
>that direction.  But in many respects I'm about a generation behind
>most people my age.

I think I'm actually in that generation. When I was growing up, there
were day rates and night rates, and the city was broken into 4 districts
and calls were local only within them. By the time I was in high school
the whole city was made one rate, and unlimited residental plans were 
available. 

It still cost $5 a minute to call from Philly to LA, and a call from
my father to his sister in Nova Scotia was a one a year event. A call to
his sister in Tel Aviv was a once in a lifetime event.

Now it does not matter. I can call anyone on a landline here or in the US
or Canada for as long as I want and I pay a monthly fee. It's called
unlimited, but in reality it's 2500-3000 minutes a month.

Cell phones here cost money to call because when the call termination
fee (aka "connection fee") was supposed to go down from 1/2 a sheckel in
2005 to 5 hundreths (a reduction of 90%), the cellular companies
complained so the Ministry of Communications (our FCC) took it on themselves
to only cut it in half.



>I don't do any significant amount of LD from my house land line (a fax
>every few months is about it); my cell has tolerable but not
>particularly good LD rates.  Through work (who does VoI, for which I am
>primary geek) I have a LD account which has reasonably good rates (a
>cent or two a minute within US48+CA, assorted mostly-decent rates
>outside that), and I've got DISA set up so I can call out at those
>rates whenever I'm in local calling range of either of the two cities I
>spend almost all of my time in.

I guess it also depends upon whom you call. Most of my international
communication is via email. I assume if I were younger or had more
friends in odd places, I'd call them, but I don't. 

In fact, most of my emails are to/from people I have not, and probably
will never meet in person, for example almost everyone reading this.

Occasionaly when I have actually called people on this list, they have
been surprised. It's hard to wrap you head around the fact that I can
call the US more cheaply (even with a landline and no special calling
plan) than I can call either of my son's on their cell phones.

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel gsm at mendelson.com  N3OWJ/4X1GM