-ZM> In every other business I know of, when a product is more
-ZM> in demand,
-ZM> generally the price falls. The only reason for higher
-ZM> prices during the
-ZM> day for phones is because they can get away with it. It's
-ZM> not like the
-ZM> old days when more telephone operators had to be employed
-ZM> daytime to
-ZM> cope with the volume. Nowadays it costs the same to operate
-ZM> 24 hours a
-ZM> day for the providers because it is fully automated. In
-ZM> fact, logically
-ZM> off-peak calls should cost more because less revenue is
-ZM> generated in
-ZM> those times but the same amount of personnel are employed
-ZM> by the
-ZM> providers and cost the same.
The problem is still capacity. Lower prices, people talk longer and make more 
calls, if you don't increase system capacity, then the blocking rates go up. 
People get more fast busies, calls are dropped because of no room on the cell 
site that the call is supposed to be handed too.
Unfortunately, the number of radio channels for cellular is limited so once 
you hit the limit for an area, the only thing you can do is to split sites, 
this is expensive and isn't always possible due to the problems of getting 
tower space. Besides, you can only make the cells so small.
Unfortunately, with cellular telephony, more people can sometimes make things 
worse rather than better. If it isn't economical to increase capacity thruout 
the whole system, rates may have to be raised to keep traffic levels down to 
acceptable levels. Otherwise the system may become so busy that it becomes 
difficult to make calls or keep calls.
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