[asterisk-biz] Any Cellular Phone Related Businesses in CanadaInterested in Call Transfers?

[emist]

Hey Trixter,

Can you explain a bit more about the "early media" adverts and why there
aren't any per minute charges?

Thanks,

Igor H.

Trixter aka Bret McDanel wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-08-01 at 12:38 -0400, Richard Siddall wrote:
>> I was basing it on some of the explanatory pages on the FCC site, not 
>> the underlying orders.  (Of course, when I did a web search to try to 
>> find a reference to reply to Steve, I couldn't find the pages.)
>>
>> I'm 99.9% sure a couple of months back I saw a PDF on the FCC site that 
>> used the term "speculation" when talking about toll-free numbers, but it 
>> doesn't show up in Google now.
>>
> 
> Ok, then its likely that what I found was it, because I googled with
> 'speculation' as well, since that was the term that you provided.  To
> answer someone elses email, yes its almost identical to domain
> squatting, and in some cases it has painful responses.  There are some
> who like the domain squatters will query SMS/800 for recently available
> numbers, and will yank them asap.  In one case a rape crisis hotline was
> shut down, a week later it was a porn line, not good for those calling.
> 
> Basically the FCC feared that people would get good tollfrees, those
> that spell something, or all 0' or ...  "cherry numbers" and would start
> inflating the prices of them, just as domain names have been done, and
> selling them off.  They do not want the numbers themselves to be a
> commodity traded that way, basically company X needs to sell all their
> tollfrees for the same price, and not charge a premium for '800' where
> '888/77/66/55' are discounted, if they get 800-something that is salable
> as the name they shouldnt do that as well.
> 
> To get around this 2 main methods have been done it seems.  There are
> probably others, but ...  A combo package of the telephone number,
> domain name that matches, and all that are sold.  In this way the phone
> number is not sold at a premium, the extra money comes from the matching
> domain name, and all that.  The other way is to form 2 companies, one
> that only does the "cherry numbers" and all of them are highly priced.
> This way is a bit more sketchy.  Come to think about it I havent seen
> either of these two advertised in 3 or so years, so maybe there was a
> crackdown against it.  It used to be regularly that I would see this.
> 
> Of course this does not stop a canadian company from doing the same
> thing, after all the tollfree pool is the same between countries, more
> or less, and the FCC can only make US based orders.  
> 
> 
>> I was looking into this as our original toll-free number started getting 
>> a lot of calls for a long distance phone card provider with a different 
>> toll-free prefix.
> 
> HA what a place to do a "early media" advert for services.  Early media
> means no answering supervision so no per minute charges (why american
> idol vote lines operate that way).  You can then advertise better rates
> or whatever and capture some customers.  Its their fault for calling the
> "advert line" instead of the number they wanted :)
> 
>