Hacker News Reader

Comment by bkyan | Hacker News Reader

Are these termination fees still in effect?

In some rural areas there are still extremely high ratecenters that are costly to call. Looking at a ratedeck, 1240655 (Maryland), most Montana numbers and especially the Northwestern Territories (up in Canada) are the costliest to call, ranging from a few cents a minute to tens of cents a minute. Most flat rate VOIP operators won't deliver calls to those numbers, and if they do, they'll close your account if you call there too often.

The FCC has been cracking down on Traffic Pumping (which is what FreeConferenceCall, AOL, NetZero, etc were all created to do) to these prefixes, along with fake ringing that companies including T-Mobile do to make it seem like the call is being connected to these high cost areas, meanwhile the person your calling doesn't ever receive the call (or it gets through after attempting to call for multiple minutes).

> along with fake ringing that companies including T-Mobile do to make it seem like the call is being connected to these high cost areas, meanwhile the person your calling doesn't ever receive the call

Interestingly enough T-Mobile has started giving me a notice before calls to some of these providers saying that I'll be charged 1 cent a minute for the call.

T-Mobile claims they are only doing this on traffic pumped numbers that cost them significantly more than that to call, but from the little I've looked into it they're charging this fee on paid conference call numbers that cost $0.002/min to call in the ratedecks I've checked (after doing an LRN DIP of course).

I've reached out to T-Mobile's business team repeatedly on an account that I'm a POC on to get a full list of surcharged numbers, but they are unwilling to disclose this basic information. This kind of stuff is what keeps businesses on Sprint and Verizon, at least they know their NANPA calls will get delivered reliably without surprise surcharges!

Does the same apply to places like Bermuda, Guam and Trinidad which are in the North American +1 area?

I've wondered how that works. In other countries / continents, it's clear when I'm calling a foreign number as the prefix is different. It's also common that different costs are reflected in the local number, like British numbers beginning 07 being mobile phones; it costs more to call one from a basic landline.

Does calling Bermuda cost the same as calling New York?

Bermuda looks to be slightly under 4 cents per minute, Guam is 2 cents per minute, Trinidad is around 20 cents per minute. I've yet to see any provider include these area codes in their NANPA ratedecks, so presumably they won't route them as NANPA numbers (yet to test that though). I know for wireless carriers, callback fraud where a Trinidad number will call you briefly to make it look like you missed a call and thus call back is quite popular. I'd assume the fraudsters are getting a revenue cut on inbound calls...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com