And as the other poster said, there is.
Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?
Even the article points out that it was difficult and expensive to maintain, why is it unreasonable to charge proportionally to that, or indeed whatever the small number of people wanting it will actually pay?
Let's be real, we're all tech engineers here. Telephony backbones are all IP based now. It's all just mappings on a computer that routes your call to the right next hop. There's nothing at all special about maintaining one mapping vs another.
But I don’t have any domain knowledge here, so this is really just a guess
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All I know about telecoms comes from Wikipedia, but that makes no sense. Why would the technology that determines where to route your call be related to the protocol used to transfer data long distances?
(Also the Verizon quote is from 2003.)
It might have cost 2500 per area code when that was a requirement and you had to set these up loops up manually across longer distances, but nowadays it literally is just going to be a mapping in a computer, like any other.