Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555) wrote to Steven Horn at 16:42 on 11 Dec 2002:

 MvdV> Hmmm, it appears to me that he relatively cheap is only true
 MvdV> because of the exorbitant charges you have to pay in your part of
 MvdV> the world for long distance calls.

These charges have dropped like a stone here for the same reasons you
outline in the parts of your message that I'm not quoting.  But cheap long
distance calls are only part of the solution.  What I also encountered was
poor line quality so that there was endless retraining and very slow
transfer rates.

Again, this might now have been corrected but it does not matter.  I new
get my echomail from 1:140/1 at a speed of 200Kbps.  I'm not going back.:-)

 MvdV> Conversely, the cost of local calls has gone up slightly. When
 MvdV> Dutch Telecomn had a monopoly the "last mile" was run below
 MvdV> actual cost and the losses were compensated by the profit on the
 MvdV> international calls, but with the advent of competition this was
 MvdV> no longer possible. Local calls had to generate profit on their
 MvdV> own, so the price went up, but by far not as much as the long
 MvdV> distance prices dropped.

Our local telco used the same argument here and local rates did go up to
some extent.  However, we never got stuck with a "per call"
charge and I can now appreciate why my parents had a lock on the telephone.

 MvdV> I wonder why this mechanism seems to work different your side of
 MvdV> the pond. 

I think our rates started falling in 1999 and are now cheap.

Take care,

Steven Horn (steven_a_horn{at}yahoo.ca)
Moderator, ALASKA_CHAT 
--- timEd/386 1.10.y2k+