Just to expand on this a little bit, in a slightly new direction. Verizon estimates that it will make $600,000,000 this year off of "extra options" in voice mail prompts. By expanding the voice mail menu options (1 for urgent 2 to page, etc) and doing everything possible to make sure that people stay on the phone for as long as possible they are eating minutes off this.
Now verizon does not make a whole lot on people calling other verizon customers, after all they give free calling to "in network" numbers. So where does this $600M come from? The only place that Verizon can bill for air time that is not in network is if the caller is from a different telephone carrier, and since they are not premium numbers this is access charges (for non US/CA people mobiles and landlines are billed about the same here unlike most of the rest of the world). Basically the callers telephone company is paying for that, which ultimately the caller does by way of a monthly subscription charge or a per minute charge if the call is not local. This is all off of 15-30 seconds of extra calling time per call at probably the FCC cap of $0.007/minute (I think that cap applies to CMRS providers). It sure does take a whole lot of those calls to reach $600M, which far exceeds any conferencing, or even what futurephone was doing. Add in all the other mobile providers that are doing the same thing, and you really start to see a huge amount of money that no one is really complaining about. -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel pgp key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x8AE5C721 _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz