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

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Sun, 2006-01-01 at 19:51 -0500, C F wrote:
> 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.

In Sacramento they were advertising $55/mo for  that plan a couple
months ago.  A friend who is a cell dealer looked that plan up in
Pennsylvania and was unable to locate it, he called his rep and they
said that it was only offered in very select areas.  But its national so
if you do sign up here you keep the plan even if you get a new number in
a different area.  Interesting concept :)

However sprint is more expensive than some of the other carriers that
offer flat rate, but they have more coverage so ...


> Cingular/AT&T offers, free mobile to mobile, and free weekends and
> nights. They also have something called rollover minutes that allows
Tmobile has/had free nights/weekends and optionally $5 extra free
fridays.  So you get 3 full days and all nights to make calls ('night is
often defined in the US mobile market as 9pm-7am).

Watch billing there are tricks that work for or against you.  *most*
carriers will do billing when the call starts not when it ends.  Tmobile
for example terminates a call at exactly 3 hours 59 minutes 59 seconds
on the dot.  If you start 1 second before 7am the entire call (4 hours
of it) are billed at the night/weekend rate - included in most plans.
However if you start a call at 8:59pm you are billed your 'peak' time
which counts against your minutes and often is 40 cents per minute if
you go over with the cheaper plans (ie $30-40 range).


> 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

tmobile optionally can use CID for authentication into voicemail.  This
is an option to 'not ask for a password when called from your
mobile' (or something similar is how its worded).  Many people enable
this for convienience.  Paris Hilton was one such person.

A friend on tmobile started receiving calls from his own number, so it
also appears that people are scanning tmobile blocks trying to locate
such configurations.

At least its optional and *off* by default ...


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
UK +44 870 340 4605   Germany +49 801 777 555 3402
US +1 360 207 0479 or +1 516 687 5200
FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.sacaug.org/ Sacramento Asterisk Users Group
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