[asterisk-users] Forwarding to a caller-pays mobile

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sat, Sep 23, 2006 at 04:18:25PM +0200, Michiel van Baak wrote:
> On 15:49, Sat 23 Sep 06, Leif Neland wrote:
> > >How might you identify a mobile #? (assuming you refer to cellular
> > >phones) Now that phone companies are allowing you to transfer your
> > >land line to a mobile, it's no longer practical to use prefix
> > >blocking.
> > 
> > If a land line is transfered to mobile, does it cost more to call it than a 
> > real land line?
> > 
> > If it does; I'd require the phone company to give me a warning tone when I 
> > call a disguised mobile.
> > If it doesn't, then don't bother to block mobiles.
> 
> The costs for the call to mobile are for the person that
> forwards his/her number to mobile.

Ah, yes...

the old "caller-pays" dispute.

By way of background (this is an *old* topic on the telecom groups), in
the United States (and perhaps a few other places), calls to mobile
phones charge the *called party* -- the one who has the mobile phone,
and always have, back to the days of 150MHz band MTS and IMTS.

In most of the rest of the world, the *caller to the mobile* pays the
surcharge.

I've always come down on the "cell phone subscriber pays" side of the
ledger, for two reasons which seem perfectly sensible -- and overriding
-- to *me*:

1) pragmatically, there's no reliable way to signal to the caller that
they're placing a call to a number that will charge them $0.35 to $0.80
or more per minute, over any long-distance tolls they might expect to
pay.  Remember before commenting on this that I mean "a signal that
could be detected automatically by equipment" like Asterisk -- which
was out topic on point.  There's no standard in-band way to carry
rating information in the PSTN -- the best you can do is intuit it from
the destination DN and your knowledge of the selected carrier.

And remember too, that that intuition works even less well in these
days of Wireless Number Portability.

2) ethically, the cell subscriber should be the one whose payng,
anyway: it is to *them* that the convenience of the mobile phone
accrues, not to the caller.

So, if you live in a jurisdiction with both WNP *and* caller-pays,
and the abililty to forward calls to a mobile, you're pretty much
screwed: there's *no* reliable way to protect yourself in advance from
people incurring charges to you by using a forwarding service you
provide to forward their calls to a mobile.

I'll repeat that: *No reliable way*.

Anyone got an informed counter argument?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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