You never know what you might find here.
In my (distant) past I spent 3 years with the above mentioned company. One of my tasks was to install and upgrade the old 'Strouger'(sp) switches that drove the phone exchanges then. These electromechanical beasts came in a variety of flavours depending upon their use.
There needed to be a 'line-finder' at the beginning of any switch path which provided dial-tone to the user and passed the pulses on to the next switch in the line. The number of line-finders in each group of about 100 lines determined how many of that 100 users could dial out at any given time.
In this scenario, lines such as the Business Metered lines could be 'graded' in as a lower number of potential dialout lines and thereby save money for the company - hence lower costs and lower prices.
This technology has long since disapeared (well almost, some stuff is still out in the boonies and in other parts of the world) and so the justification for the different pricing is essentially non-existant. All lines now go through the exact same computer switching mechanism, and have exactly the same amount of gear connected to them. The only difference is a flag in the billing software which says 'this line gets charged this much, this other line gets charged this other amount'. All other differences are pure tradition, not ecconomic. I know there are differences in the amount one line gets used over what another gets used, and there are reasons for maybe billing one user more than another, but the underlying equipment is identical for all lines now.
But this works both ways - the Business overline is tarriffed as 2 different rates depending on how many lines are connected together. In the old electromechanical days, lines with many overlines were difficult to setup and maintain, so a different (higher) rate was not too unreasonable. Today, the difference is again non-existant, and in fact having many lines on one number actually conserves a scarce resource for the phone company (phone numbers) since the extra lines no longer each get individual numbers in sequence, but instead get 'internal' (hex) numbers which the computer understands but which the user can't actually dial.
Oh well, I guess that my next job is to start appearing at CRTC hearings into phone company rate increases :-(
What, you might ask, does this all have to do with the Internet?
It is indicatave of the inertia in the pricing of communications in light of changes in technology. It is an example of what has become a game in dealing with the various monopolies and government agencies in our struggle to build the new information world.
Another example of the games is the "UBIQUITY" facility that is being offered by one of the BC Tel offshoots. This facility gives the customer the equivallent of a 10 Megabit Ethernet connection from virtually any location within BC to virtually any other location in BC.
This means that for example, your Kelowna office computer can look like it is sitting beside your Vancouver office computer as far as the Local Area Network software is concerned - a wonderful thing! And what if you have some special software and hardware on your 2 computers that allows you to speak into a microphone on one computer and have the sound come out of the other? - NO NO NO - can't do that! - it is against the CRTC regulations and not allowed, because then you would be able to circumvent the phone company's regulated voice circuits and go into competition with them. Hmmm, Very Interesting.
All this is leading up to one observation. "Things are changing, hurry up and wait"
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