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Posted by John Levine on March 30, 2008, 11:04 am
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>E.164 does not mandate a change in existing dial plans, but does
>indeed recommend ...
The U.S. in general only adopts ITU telephony recommendations to the
extent that they're needed to interface with other countries. We will
never change our signalling or our dialing plan to agree with the ITU.
(After all, ours predate the ITU's, and they decided to do something
else.)
>I don't know much about the charges and functionality offered by US pay
>phones, but whereever I've travelled (except Thailand in 1991), it has
>always been possible to use payphones for IDD calls at reasonable rates
US pay phones are indeed unlike payphones most other places. They vary
enormously, both depending on the pay phone provider and the long distance
service. In cities with large immigrant populations it's sometimes
possible to find pay phones which offer reasonable international rates,
typically 10 cpm, but most pay phones don't offer international coin calls
at all. The U.S. is a large country, and most Americans have still never
made an international phone call.
For the minority who do make international calls, prepaid phone cards with
reasonable rates are widely available, with access via domestic toll-free
numbers. VoIP carriers usually offer cheap long distance as well; my
Lingo VoIP service includes all of western Europe in the local flat rate
(free for the first 500 mins/mo) calling area.
I agree that using a roaming mobile phone in the U.S. is rarely an
attractive proposition. We use 850/1900 MHz rather than the 900/1800
used in most other countries, and only about half of our networks are
GSM. Even if you do have a quad band phone, the roaming rates are
punishing. I have a T-Mobile SIM from the UK which would cost 55p/min
to use here, about $1.10/min for all calls, and an Orange Switzerland
SIM which would cost CHF 4.50 outbound and 2.80 inbound. Ouch!
R's,
John
| ![Re: 00+, 011+, etc. (was Local 10-Digit Dialing) [telecom]](/images/header.jpg)
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