[Asterisk-biz] Do US providers surcharge 0800 calls?

[C F]

BTW, speaking about free cell to cell and free incoming and/or outgoing:
Sprint has (or used to have) unlimited incoming and outoing plans for
~$100+ month. They also have free unlimited night and weekends as well
as free mobile to mobile.
Nextel (now part of Sprin/Nextel), offers unlimited incoming and
outgoing (might be discontinued), as well as the more popular free
incoming plans, but their billing is very bad, or so poeple that have
them say.
Cingular/AT&T offers, free mobile to mobile, and free weekends and
nights. They also have something called rollover minutes that allows
you to use your minutes in plan that you hanv'nt uses this month to be
available for next month. The rollover feature used to be abused (ppl
would buy expensive $200 plans which had 5k+ plus minutes for 2
months, then lower their plans to $30 ones, and had about a year to
use those 10k minutes plus what they got for the $30 for just $700),
so they added some restrictions.
However currently Cingulars (wasn't tested with others) free mobile to
bobile uses CID to verify on incoming calls that its a cingular phone
making the call, so a cheap callback system using asterisk can be
installed so that you get free unlimited phone calls using your
Cingular phone, all that has to be done is to make sure that caller ID
is set to one belonging to a Cingular phone. A callback system can
also be done with Nextel (since they have free incoming), but the
cheapst Nextel free incoming plan is around $75 per month, while the
cheapest fee mobile to mobile with Cingular is much cheaper (as well
as their prepaid has that).
Sprint uses CID for routing to VM vs cell phone, but not for
authentication, when I call my sprint VM from my cell phone, I get a
prompt Please enter your password, but when calling my Sprint phone
using the CID of my cell phone (from another phone), my cell phone
never rings, nor do I hear on the outgoing call that it rings, it goes
directly to VM, but not to the please enter your password, it takes me
to regular VM instead.
I'm not sure about others, but it would realy be nice to know.

On 1/1/06, Harry McGregor <hmcgregor at espri.arizona.edu> wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 20:19 +0000, Obelix wrote:
> > Do US cellular providers surcharge outgoing 0800 calls?
>
> I don't know about surcharge, they do charge normal airtime rates.  Even
> if the cell phone does not include Long Distance, long distance will not
> be charged on 800/888/877/866 calls.
>
> > I gather they also charge users to receive calls. Is that true?
>
> US Cell phones are cell phone owner pays for almost everything, outgoing
> and incoming calls both bring the same airtime charges.  Some cell companies
> offer free in network calling (Sprint to Sprint, Verizon to Verizon, etc), and
> thus you would not be charged for incoming or outgoing on those calls, IF that
> is part of your cell phone plan.
>
> One company, Nextel offers some plans with free incoming calls, but out side of
> Nextel it's not common.
>
>
>                         Harry
>
> > /Obelix
> >
> >
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