Re: texst to a landline

On 1/4/2025 6:47 AM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2025-01-04 09:07, Jörg Lorenz wrote:

On 04.01.25 02:07, Newyana2 wrote:

On 1/3/2025 5:34 PM, Chris wrote:
>

   There's no such thing.

>
There certainly is.

>
I'm talking about the US.

>
As far as state of the art telecom services are concerned, they are one
or two decades behind Europe. Not only with fixed line services.

 Which is weird, considering that they built very good PSTN hardware, state of the art, which was installed both sides of the pond. I'm thinking of the Lucent aka AT&T 5ESSS, for instance, witch which I worked.
 Of course, they charged per feature, so the operators would not activate all the features.
 

   I'm not a history expert, but I think there are probably two
main factors. One is that corporations have great power here.
Patents, monopoly and scam marketing are rampant limitations.
I get flyers from Verizon for their fiberoptic service that have
maybe 500 words of disclaimers on them that I can't even read
with my glasses on. It's absurd. That text lists the endless
number of restrictions and gotchas that apply to their advertised
sale price. And it doesn't even detail all of them. Which means it's
not possible to actually find out the price of the service!
   Cellphones are similar. A few years ago I went around to each
of 4 companies to find out what their rates were. All started at
$39.99. Not one of them could tell me what the actual cost would
be after they added in mickey mouse fees. A woman who was in
one store to pay her bill was nice enough to show me hers. It was
about $80 -- twice the advertised rate.
   We were forced to rent telephones until they broke up Bell
Telephone. Long distance calls only became affordable much
later. To this day I wouldn't call Europe. I have no idea what
it would cost.
   The other difference in the US is that it's largely rural. I have
a brother with no home cellphone access and who only recently
got Internet via cable. That's common. It's expensive to run
the wires. Companies don't want to maintain old wires and they
don't want to put up towers in sparsely populated areas.