Cobalt wrote:
But they still exist at the lower end and in pre-pay, with limited minutes per month.
Not really. At least on ATT there’s one lone prepay plan left that charges per minute, all others are unlimited. Don’t know about the other providers but imagine the situation to be similar.
172driver wrote:
The days of incoming charges in the US are loooong gone
In general, incoming calls are taken from your call allowance the same way outgoing calls are….
In any case, I am not aware of any mobile calling plan here (US) that doesn’t include unlimited calls to any US number.
…which means indeed for unlimited US calls plans, they are gone. But they still exist at the lower end and in pre-pay, with limited minutes per month.
The reason for this is directly linked that US mobiles have a regular area code. There is no way for the caller to know whether the call is local, to a mobile, or to a mobile in a different area, so the telcos charged the (originally quite high) call cost for the mobile connection to the receiver of the call. This was especially important for the telcos since at that time, local calls were unlimited / free on most landlines, with most phone users paying for long distance outgoing calls only.
With unlimited national plans now being ubiquitous, this is less of an issue.
The days of incoming charges in the US are loooong gone. There is no difference between mobile and landlines. Mobile numbers in the US also are geographical, e.g. mine starts with 310, which is part of the Los Angeles area codes (there are several). You take your mobile number with you in the US, I have several East Coast friends who live in L.A. but still have their old, e.g. 917 (NYC) number. In any case, I am not aware of any mobile calling plan here (US) that doesn’t include unlimited calls to any US number.
You can’t tell the difference.
The big difference (which either enabled this or forced it to happen) is in the US, you pay for both outgoing and incoming calls on a mobile (and also for incoming text messages, which meant a malicious party could spam your phone and stick you with a huge bill). In the UK (except when roaming is involved), the caller always pays and the callee never pays. In the US, calling a mobile number in your area code was a free local call, with the person you called – in the early days – paying the 50 cents a minute charges (considerably cheaper or even unmetered these days).
Also, AFAIK, the USA has the same numbering system for mobile numbers as for land numbers. I am not sure you can tell the difference. In the UK you certainly can tell, but the value in that (avoiding the more expensive calls) is probably gone since so many people, especially younger people, live purely on a mobile number.
Numbering complexity has little to do with privatisation. The US system has always been private (although at certain stages, it’s been an AT&T private monopoly). The US has just had a better numbering plan, that’s all – which was put into place probably before it all got out of hand because the US telephone system was entirely electronic a couple of decades before the UK’s and thus didn’t need all the workarounds for all the old equipment (my local phone exchange was still a mechanical Strowger in the early 1990s, and mechanical Strowger exchanges were still in service in the UK until the mid-90s).
Thanks Dimme, that’s a good explanation.
Assuming this calling strategy uses completely random target numbers or sequences, it will be more effective in US than UK. It’s observable in US that an innocently mis-dialled number will very often connect to an equally innocent subscriber. In UK, the vast bureaucratic number profligacy means that a mis-dialled number is less likely to be in service. This is the one benefit we have of allowing our public service to foist us with 11-digit numbers (more complexity than the 10 digit US!) as punishment for insisting on ‘privitisation’! Kind of 8.33 of the telephone.
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So I have been in contact with my operator. According to them these people are calling around 100 numbers at once, and the first one that answers gets connected to some call center that tries to sell you something. The remaining 99 calls get dropped. The operator claims there is nothing they can do about that and they hope it will die out in due time.
Now at least it makes sense why they hang up, they brute force themselves to someone that answers.
That sort of thing is perhaps intended to block calls from known people who harrass you (the ex, etc). I wonder how they implement it, because if you withold your caller ID it is still delivered all the way to the destination exchange 
A lot of people I have known block calls from CLI-witheld numbers, which just makes their life harder for a negligible gain.
I suspect what Dimme is seeing is another fashion which will go away in due course.
Frequently I get “The caller has withheld his number”.
I got a BT email today about activating a free service for refusing calls from listed numbers. A useless idea, which BT should know is useless.
PS I’ve never raised nuicance calls with BT, my services provider.
