16 Sep
2012
16 Sep
'12
10 a.m.
On 15 September 2012 20:54, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
On 15 Sep 2012 at 20:01, Tony Duell 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.)
We had one national phone company (and one rebel town in the far north
with its own). No complex tariffs, no high charges for calls from one
telco to another, etc.
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
You guys even pay to /receive/ text messages!
It looks like pathetic, chaotic madness from over here.
It's the only reason Blackberry took off with its wretched glorified
pagers; that the US phone system was so broken, random and unreliable
that mobile phones didn't take off. When the whole rest of the planet
was going over to cellphones, out of North America we got a souped-up
two-way pager that gradually added phone functionality on.
Complete insanity.
As an aside, much of the electronicv work for
codebreaking in the UK
in WW2, including Colossus, was done, IIRC, by people from the GPO
research labs. GPO = General Post Office, who at the time ran the
telephone system in the UK, and who therefore had great expereience of
switching systems.
Maybe, but in the 70s when I visited, telephones in Britain were a
nightmare compared to their US counterparts--particularly pay
telephones. And doesn't England still have coin-op residential
electrical service?
Not for 30 odd years now, no. By the 1990s, maybe some elderly people
who didn't want their equipment changed - but that was 20y ago.
Low-price rental accommodation sometimes has "power keys", where you
top up an encrypted electronic key in a corner shop and it authorises
your meter. This is still way better than coins, though. No emptying.
When I heard this referred to on an old
"Steptoe and Son" broadcast, it seemed very backward to me (you
apparently needed a lot of 1s coins to keep out of the dark).
The shilling went out before I could talk. I do not remember pounds,
shillings and pence at all. I am 44.
--
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