[wplug] Google Voice

[Eli Heady]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 5:58 PM, Matthew J Hughes <matthues at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also, I was listening to TWIT or OSNEWS podcast (I am catching up) from a
> couple of months ago. One of the traditional carriers, AT&T iirc, was asking
> the FCC to look into Google voice because they did not provide service to
> certain rural areas. ( there was an assertion, the areas had adult call
> centers located in them, not sure who that relates tho.)


It's about competitive local exchange carriers in rural areas that are
allowed to charge many times more than the going rate for long
distance. I'm not sure when the practice began, but it was at least as
far back as the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The aim was to spur
competition in rural areas by giving CLEC's a leg up over ILEC's
(incumbent local exchange carriers). Since then, some CLEC's have
begun partnering with free conference companies, adult talk services,
etc, etc to have them use numbers in their exchanges, and then they
charge wads of cash from the originators of those calls. This is why
the free conference numbers are in far away, unheard-of area codes.

Google has decided that it can't afford to pay the CLEC's and still
offer free service to everyone.