goldstein%delni.DEC@decwrl.dec.com (Fred R. Goldstein dtn226-7388) (08/26/88)
In Telecom V8I133, Scott Statton writes, >For readers in the United States (and Canada, I believe) you live with >something that we would find unthinkable -- you pay message units for >INCOMING calls as well as outgoing. (At least in Britain, that is >so). No, they do not charge for incoming calls in the UK, or anywhere else that I know of. Special services like 800 numbers, Enterprise, Freefone, etc., are reverse-billed, as are many X.25 lines, but not local exchange service. Trivia: In 1978, General Telephone of the Southwest filed a tariff for Carlsbad, NM which proposed per-minute billing for all time offhook, including incoming, failed, and outgoing calls. It was squashed by the PUC, and never mentioned again. (Plenty of folks are ready to intervene in any rate case that tries it again.) Re: Israeli or Greek cordless phones, Fat chance it would be legal. A cordless phone has two hurdles to face. The easy one is the line interface. It _might_ work, and it _might_ not get the PTT too upset (depending upon the way that country's lines work), but it also uses radio frequencies which, in the US, are set aside for such unlicensed use. Other countries do NOT use the same frequencies for their cordless phones, if they even have them. You could be transmitting on a police, business, radar, or broadcast frequency. This would (rightfully) get the authorities quite peeved! Operating an unlicensed radio transmitter on a basically random frequency is not a way to win friends in foreign governments. fred