why the cost to call a PC for the PC user

Ok my topics are feeling a bit rubbish at the moment and i'm not contributing much however this is an issue i found last night that i don't like.

Hopefully charles or Jeff, adam, sampy or jonathan (are you still with us) will see this and point it to the correct people.

last night i wanted someone to call me, and i thought wouldn't it be great if they could call my PC as i don't have a landline.  My first thoughts were to goto my little used skype account and see how people with landlines can call me, after some searching (what is lenn doing with skype, it still sucks), i eventually found out it will cost me, yes me the PC user, to set up an account where people can call my PC from phones.  ok i thought, this is skype, still not a huge player, so i turned to Messenger Live or whatever it's called. 

Once again i found out it costs ME to setup a inbound account.  Ok i can actually see why this happens, it's not straight wire to wire, and we do have to pay line rental for a normal number so why not for a digital number.  However surely MS could batter their eyelids to make this process free.  surely something can be done, if the windows live local team can allow you to call businesses for free by using their search (http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=bc9499a1-c822-4424-9a8b-1a4abd3fac62) then the Windows Live Messenger team should be able to do something similar.

Yes because land lines don't cost you anything to setup and run so other land line users can call you, right? ... Can you only imagine if they started charging you £15/month, there would be an uproar ...

OH WAIT.. BT, and NTL both DO charge a subscription fee! ... Well how about that...

I guess like a domain, there is a charge to setup a phone number on the public telephone system... But it is only £7 for three months, and £20 for an entire year which I don't think is too bad a price. Both are far less than the commercial land line companies charge.

Manip wrote:

I guess like a domain, there is a charge to setup a phone number on the public telephone system... But it is only £7 for three months, and £20 for an entire year which I don't think is too bad a price. Both are far less than the commercial land line companies charge.

Phone line rental fees pay for a lot more than just registration, but also the maintenance and upkeep of the physical line, as well as upgrades (ADSL, anyone?)

6 years ago, when we had ISDN (ADSL only came here in late 2002), BT charged us like £120/Quater in line rental fees, on top of the ISP fees.

While, for an end user, it would cost you money to set up a land line to your house, there are a LOT of services (in the US) that allow free inbound numbers, because when you are a phone company, when another phone company connects to one of your numbers, they have to pay you.

IPKall is one of such these services, their profitability is derived from termination fees from other telephone companies.

W3bbo wrote:

6 years ago, when we had ISDN (ADSL only came here in late 2002), BT charged us like £120/Quater in line rental fees, on top of the ISP fees.

I remember ISDN. Wasn't that just two 56k modems where one was up and one was down? I remember when it cost hundreds if not thousands for that...I never understodd it even back then.

Harlequin wrote:



W3bbo wrote:6 years ago, when we had ISDN (ADSL only came here in late 2002), BT charged us like £120/Quater in line rental fees, on top of the ISP fees.

I remember ISDN. Wasn't that just two 56k modems where one was up and one was down? I remember when it cost hundreds if not thousands for that...I never understodd it even back then.

Nope

ISDN = Digital phone lines with two 64kbps communication channels. You can combine the two channels together to have a single 128kbps Internet connection or use the phone and Internet at 64kbps.

ADSL = Digital signals sent down analog lines, a step backwards IMO, but ADSL-over-ISDN is slower than ADSL-over-Copper, which is strange.

Jaz wrote:

if the windows live local team can allow you to call businesses for free by using their search (http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=bc9499a1-c822-4424-9a8b-1a4abd3fac62) then the Windows Live Messenger team should be able to do something similar.

Well, that is not free phone service exactly.  They just call you at your existing phone number (be it landline, cell phone, or VOIP), and they also call the business.  Then they connect you both so you can talk.  So really if it is a long-distance call, and you don't have unliminted long-distance, then it is not free.