Dandello wrote on Mar 1
st, 2015 at 8:33pm:
Knowingly taking this off-topic ... ISP may be working on a way to counter Net Neutrality ...
That's a very interesting observation that of course wouldn't be specific to YaBB's forum if that's actually what's going on. ISPs are notoriously known for doing whatever it takes to generate extra income beyond what they claim to provide for the cost of a regular account whether it's business or residential.
Whenever I can, I prefer to work out of my home office, which means there have always been business lines installed wherever I've lived. I'm reminded of the time when I first realized the difference in cost when it comes to various phone lines in the same place, and yet, designated for different uses.
For instance, my business lines at the time cost me 7 cents a minute for local calls while the cost of local calls on my residential line was included with the base rate. As such, when my phone bill after installing a couple of business lines ended up being a few hundred dollars for local calls, I quickly learned to make outgoing calls on my residential phone line.
That's when I also chose to have my answering machine take calls from my business lines instead of picking up the phone. I'd monitor the incoming calls, and make callbacks using my residential line. Or better yet when I was involved in an ongoing production, I'd simply have my business lines forward to a number at whatever studio or office I was working in at any given time (
to be answered by a secretary who was usually paid by another company). It's kind of silly to count pennies that way, but the savings amounted to many thousands of dollars over the years.
I also remember while producing and/or being involved in road shows how we took advantage of what was called a WATS line (
Wide Area Telephone Service). Because areas outside of our local office had so many different phone numbers (
before the days of cell phones), we pretty much always paid for an outbound WATS versus an inbound WATS. But depending on what kind of work I was involved in, sometimes we had both.
So in practice with an incoming only WATS line when calls were made to the production office, those calls were made as collect calls to a
"Mr. Green" as we usually used for a name. Those collect calls were of course never accepted. In turn, the calling number was left with the production office by the operator, and that number was promptly called back using the WATS line.
A standard reply to the operator placing a collect call would be,
"I'm sorry, but Mr. Green isn't in. May we take a call back number please?" So instead of many thousands of dollars a month in a phone bill, there would be a flat rate of $1,000 for the WATS line (
or something close to that as I recall).
Things have certainly changed since then. Now we can piggyback our phone service to our ISP for what amounts to free local and long distance calling (
with a flat rate of course). We can also use cell phones with a flat rate for so-called unlimited calling, and data use (
although nothing is really unlimited if you use too much because of fine print caps). We can even do away with most of the flat rate fees of phone service by using companies like Magic Jack (
or at least having a lower number of phone lines that are associated with one's ISP).
Now
what was the topic that Dandello mentioned again? Oh yeah! Net Neutrality. Do
not get me started. Oops! Too late!
Note: This topic has been posted for your amusement, so please take it in stride.