DISQUS

Zippy · 2 years ago

Sounds like some sort of "reciprical compensation" based business. This was was quite a big business in the late 90's.

The concept is this... Phone company A owns the phone number that you call. Phone company B must rely on PC-A to deliver the call and therefore PC-B must pay PC-A a "nominal per minute charge" to connect the call. New phone companies, called CLECs, sprung up overnight to take advantage of this. They typically provided cheap or free dial-up modem access lines to ISPs, thus steering a large volume of calls with long call durations into their phone networks. In this arrangement, (lots of calls * long call durations) = $$$$$$$

I thought all this was dead, but apparently not in Iowa. The connect charge is typically very, very small (a fraction of a cent per minute) so I'm not sure how they can keep this in the black.

Zippy · 2 years ago

I guess I need to go back to high school and learn to spell. It's "reciprocal compensation" for those that want to Google it.