On 16 Sep 2012 at 18:00, Liam Proven wrote:
Really? My fairly brief experience with American
phones has been the
precise reverse. Yes, we pay for local calls, but this means we pay a
LOT less for long-distance. (Now with internet telephony & a thousand
discount schemes, companies, phonecards and so on, this is all going
away anyway.)
There *is* the matter of scale. My state, for instance, is larger
than the entire UK in terms of land area and far more varied in terms
of geography and *much* lower in population density. It's far from
being the largest state in the union. There are many areas of this
country that are classifed as "frontier" (<6 people per square mile).
But I'll agree with you on the mobile phone mess. Wierd licensing,
odd terms of service and scams abound. This is the legacy of our
"free market" thinkers--put everything up for sale with minimum
regulation and let the devil take the hindmost. Margaret Thatcher
would be proud.
I sometimes get no signal indication, just on my daily walks out my
front door. I have to go outside of the house and walk down my
driveway to make a reliable call on mobile. On the other hand, the
wired service we inherited from the Bell conglomerate is utterly
reliable--and the telcos are trying to figure out a way to get rid of
them, as mobile is far more profitable.
The shilling went out before I could talk. I do not
remember pounds,
shillings and pence at all. I am 44.
I do--and still have a few. I also recall seeing monochrome 405-line
TV broadcasts in the UK and thought they were the most flickery awful
things I'd ever seen.
But your statement about coin-op residential electric meters in the
UK simply isn't true:
http://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?285552-Old-
Coin-Electric-Meter
--Chuck