Re: [PLUG] Separate but related question: was VOIP choices

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On 10/9/2025 10:12 PM, Steve Litt via plug wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Oct 2025 21:38:11 -0400
> Gary Duzan via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> > They do bill by the minute,
> Ouch! The return of 1976. Maybe get a WATS line? :-)

Keep in mind that real costs are accrued by the minute.  In the consumer world for marketing/political reasons this gets moved around so that consumers/voters don't get upset, but the reality is that every packet costs somebody something to deliver.

In the business world it is much more common for stuff to actually be accounted for like this, so that companies can purchase what they want.  If you only need rare outbound connections would you rather have a service with no monthly service charge but a per-minute call charge, or one that the minutes are free and unlimited, but there is a monthly service charge and if you use too many unlimited minutes then they terminate your account?

While AWS rates aren't exactly cheap, their pricing model where you pay for exactly what you use and they really don't care how much you use is refreshing in this regard.  I can upload 50PiB of data to S3 and they won't complain one bit about it.  I can back my website with S3 and send them a billion gets per hour and that won't bother them either.

We only get the illusion of free/unlimited stuff in the consumer world because you pay for it in other ways, and if you actually try to take advantage of anything being free/unlimited you'll get cut off.  The VoIP provider is just being honest.

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Rich

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