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Comment by Sir_Substance | Hacker News Reader

>As a naive outsider, seems like it wouldn't take much to just connect those two calls.

Who would you charge for the call?

All phones services I've used charge for total usage, regardless of the initiator. If someone calls me, I still get dinged for every minute I'm on the line, same as if I placed an outgoing call. (Granted, I've only used pay-as-you-go type services, so perhaps other services are different.)

In Europe all services I have seen has been of the kind where whoever makes the call pays, and nobody ever gets charged for receiving calls.

Under such a system, this can become a issue.

I bet from the phone company they don't see the problem. Both were intending to place a call so they both pay :)

Apparently only the US and Canada charge the phone owner for incoming calls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_services#Incoming_calls

Europe, Asia, Australia etc all charge the caller.

This leads to awkward situations like when I called someone in the US and they were worried that they're going to get charged international rates for a call from abroad.

Wow, dick move. Getting charged for the incoming call is something I associate with getting ripped off by roaming call charges.

Many years ago, using Virgin Mobile (in the UK) I remember being charged for incoming calls, however these days on all UK networks (and I assume this is the case for most of Europe) the caller gets charged but the callee does not

Both of them, obviously. ;)

The one with lower timestamp.

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