* Hiking up intrastate rates
Last time, we discussed the rather rude awakening that Steve had at his temporary eastern NC office when he found out that intrastate rates had returned for POTS calls made with a calling card. (It turns out that the “office” had lousy cellular coverage, and Steve did not bring a headset to use Skype.)
The latest version of Steve’s calling card had new rates (noted in the small print on the back) with a multiplier of three to eight times the normal rate per minute for calls within most states. Interstate rates, however, remained at the advertised rates, and international rates are a bargain.
Does this make sense? Absolutely not. But it does bring back memories of the days when networks were designed based on “tail end hop off.” (For those of you who are not telecommunications historians, this is a technique that was used at one time to transport phone calls in bulk over the corporate network to a regional office, from which a local call could be made.) Then we got to the point that it was often cheaper to transport calls out of state than to dial back in-state. For Steve, this harkens back to the mid-1980s when the University of North Carolina system’s network was designed so that it could be declared to be an interstate or intrastate network depending on the changes in the tariff structure.
There are a couple of lessons here. First, this is a situation that probably applies mostly to leased-line (point-to-point) network facilities. After all, one has to be able to determine fixed end-points to determine whether a service is intrastate, interstate, or international. Secondly, this will – we hope – be a problem of diminishing importance. Packet-based networks, which are becoming the de facto method for corporate networks, are almost impossible to segregate into geographic boundaries.
Nevertheless, this is one topic that we had hoped we would never have the opportunity to write about again.
Let us hear from you on this, and we’ll be glad to share comments.
