Almost everyone I know has used FreeConferenceCall.com at one time or another. This free conferencing service has been in operation since at least 1999, when I first became aware of it. At a time when other conferencing services charged up to $0.15 per minute, it was a great convenience and a great service.
The service worked, and continues to work, because of intercarrier access fees – the FCC’s regulatory mechanism by which long distance carriers must pay certain rural telcos above-market rates for terminating traffic to them. The higher fees are meant to compensate rural telcos for the higher cost of doing business in sparsely populated areas. Because FreeConferenceCall.com is able to collect these fees on the calls it receives, it can afford to provide the service for free to consumers (callers need only to pay their normal long distance charges to reach designated access numbers).
These same intercarrier access fees are what allowed recent free calling services like Futurephone and AllFreeCalls.net to give away international calling minutes. But, last week AT&T put an end to Futurephone’s business by filing a lawsuit against the Iowa CLEC, Superior Telephone Cooperative, that was collecting the access fees for their calls. In a nutshell, their argument is that the access charges it paid to Superior for Futurephone calls are fraudulent because the called party was not a resident of Iowa.
It is a cogent argument, and one that will probably find favor in the courts. To quote my business partner, Stu Sleppin, when he heard about the Futurephone service – “That can’t be legal.” Most pundits seem to agree that the Futurephone service violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the access charge rules.
Though not as blatantly across the line, the same argument that AT&T is making about Futurephone can be made about the FreeConferenceCall service. The access numbers it uses are selected primarily for the fees that can be generated by calling them. They have no relation at all to the location of the parties to the conference call, who can and are located everywhere in the world. As much as I would be sorry to see it end, if I had to give odds, I would bet that a win for AT&T against Futurephone is a loss for FreeConferenceCall.
On the other hand, for the technologically savvy, it matters less than ever. Free or inexpensive software abounds. It doesn’t take much to download Asterisk or the Ondo PBX and run your very own conferencing service.
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Related: FCC page on Intercarrier Compensation; Journal of High Technology Law; Paul Kapustka; Christopher Herot