PeDaSp wrote on Aug 30
th, 2005 at 6:37pm:
But soon VoIP will come and rescue us all and we will no more pay for call charges then we would pay for email!
PeDaSp contrary to your overly optimistic predictions on Voip you will still pay for voice calls to the abusers because there is a clear cost to them in taking voice calls that cannot be avoided. Clearly ICSTIS will set up a replacement regime for current 09 premium numbers using Voip calling and credit card payments instead.
Easyjet successfully avoids all possible support costs on emails sent to them by forwarding them all immediately to the recycle bin. That is why emails can be received for free. Because there is no need for merely receiving an email to impose any additional costs on your business at all. But taking voice calls does impose an additional cost, assuming that is that you ever let the caller escape from the electronic queue and speak to a human operator instead!
By the way as to Compuserve charging oddly well they still charge a 10USD monthly retainer fee just for still having the account and then munificently allow you to connect for 5 hours a month, so long as you pay the phone bill, and then after that charge 3USD an hour just to be connected on a phone call for which you are paying. My mother had one of these legacy email accounts she inherited from my father. I have recently finally weaned her away in favour of a £5 per month 0808 dial up service from
www.flexi-surf.co.uk.
The whole point of being an AOL customer was that you were a dummy who needed your hand held which is why they were always the most expensive in the market place. To not only ditch 0800 calls but to replace it with 0870 is utterly beyond belief. The people who run these businesses are utter cynics.
~ Edit by Dave: Thread merged and link on quote box updated.