purple motes

Better Internet connectivity tends to be associated with more urban areas, areas with a greater concentration of high-tech industries and employees, and areas with wealthier, more educated populations.   These factors, however, do not provide simple explanations for the actual geographic pattern of Internet download speeds from Akamai's server network.  According to Akamai's measurements (which include residential and business customers), the U.S. state with the highest average Internet download speed in the second quarter of 2009 was New Hampshire.  New Hampshire is noted for extensive forests, beautiful mountains, and ice fishing.  Illinois, in contrast, includes Chicago, the third-largest U.S. city and long a major hub of trading and banking.  In average Internet download speed, Illinois ranks 45 out of all 51 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.  Illinois' average Internet download speed is only 46% that of New Hampshire.  While New York state is near the top of the average speed ranking and Alaska is at the bottom, unexpected relative positions, such as those of New Hampshire and Illinois, are prevalent in the ranking.

Unexpected dispersion in Internet download speeds appears in other Akamai data.  Looking at the distribution of download speeds across IP addresses within states, Washington state, which includes the headquarters of Microsoft and other high-tech companies, has among the lowest shares of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s.    That share for Washington is 77%.   Nevada and Maine, in comparison, have 98% and 96%, respectively, of IP addresses downloading at faster than 768 kbits/s.[1]   Looking at download speeds by cities, the city with the highest average download speed is Sandy City, Utah, and the next highest, Norman, Oklahoma.[2]   Most persons have never heard of either.

Dispersion in Internet download speeds suggests that idiosyncratic organizational factors greatly affect Internet connectivity.[3]   Technology for providing relatively high-speed Internet access is well understood and widely available.   But Internet connectivity impinges on a vast array of organizational activities and interests.  That's a real Internet congestion problem.

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Data: Internet download speeds across U.S. states and cities, as measured by Akamai (Excel version)

Notes:

[1]  For the U.S. as a whole, the FCC's OBI Technical Paper No. 4, Broadband Performance, shows that 88% of U.S. Internet users have actual download speeds greater than 1 Mbps.  See Exhibit 18, which is based on comScore data for the first half of 2009.   Few comScore data are publicly available and little is know about the specifics of comScore's measurements.  See Steve Bauer, David Clark, and William Lehr, "Understanding Broadband Speed Measurements," pp. 16-7.   In the UK in May, 2010, about 92% of residential broadband connections had actual average download speeds greater than 4 Mbps.  See UK Broadband Speeds 2010.  Estimate based on Figures 4.2 and 4.5.

[2]  The set of cities considered are the top-ten cities by IP address density in each state.  See Akamai, "Observed Average Internet Speeds for U.S. Network Connections," p. 2.

[3] This dispersion does not particularly characterize the U.S.  Considering mobile broadband world-wide in 1Q 2010, Akamai observed:

we see that there is an extremely wide range in average connection speeds – oddly enough, the highest (7175 Kbps) and the lowest (105 Kbps) were both seen on providers in Slovakia.

See Akamai, State of the Internet, 1st Quarter, 2010 Report, p. 25.

2 Comments

The DS1 and DS3 rates that the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users filed publicly at the FCC are now accessible as an online, highly capable Needle domain (database).  Needle is a data system that makes it easy to look at the data in different ways and to sort and filter it, all from within a web browser.

The original filings (here, here, and here) provide the data as pdf pages displaying tables with highly complex row and column structures.   A human can read and page through the data as if it were text.  That data format serves neither the reading capabilities of humans nor the data-processing capabilities of computers.

To make the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 rate data more accessible,  I extracted it from the pdf files and re-organized it into one, regular, comma-separated-value (CSV) file with 3698 data rows.  I also put together some relevant data documentation.   Analyzing the CSV file with a spreadsheet is possible but cumbersome.   Since the CSV file has a simple tabular data form, it's easy to analyze with a database program, if you have one.   You would download the data, import it into the database program, and then set up and run a query that generated the data view that you seek.

Needle makes many different views of the data easily accessible to a web browser.  Within Needle, a dataset is a graph of data nodes, where each data node is a single piece of data of a particular type.   The Needle Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 domain shows (on the left under "Every:") a linked list of every node type in that dataset.   If you click on any of these node types, a table will appear that has as its leftmost column a list of all the data nodes of the clicked type.   So, for example, if you click on "bandwidth," you will see the nodes DS1 and DS3 in the left column of the table.  The table also shows the number of attribute sets and the average circuit10 rate (a composite rate) across the DS1 and DS3 nodes, respectively.  You can look at the circuit10 rates by clicking on the circuit10 link (node type) on the left.   The resulting table shows all the circuit10 rates, in descending order, in the left column.  Other columns of the table show other attributes associated with each circuit10 rate.

For any table that you see, you can filter, sort, and group the data.  For example, to limit the table of circuit10 rates to DS1 rates, left click on the "bandwidth" column heading, select "filter by this column" in the pop-up menu, type DS1 into the box next to "show", and then click on "do" just to the right of that box.   The table will then contract to show just the DS1 circuit10 rates.  A similar procedure produces filters for company, year, state, reg type, term, and zone.  If you want to see the elements of each of these data types, click on that type on the left.   Options on the pop-up menu also provide for sorting and grouping.  Under "Index" on the top left, the "rates" and "rates subset" links show examples of tables made from grouping, filtering, and  sorting the cn (attribute set) nodes.  The "compare 2009 to 2006" and "compare 2009 to 2005" links under the index heading show tables that include circuit10 price ratios across the relevant years.  You can sort and filter these tables like any other table.

Any subset of data can be extracted easily from Needle.  At the bottom of each table are links "See this data as: Plain List · CSV · JSV · JSONa".  Just click on CSV to download a CSV file of the data.  If the table has groups, you need to flatten the table (switch grouping to a regular data column) before exporting.  Needle also offers API functionality that allows Needle to serve as a data repository for high-powered statistical analysis packages such as R or S.

Needle can do much more than what it is doing for the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 dataset.  Needle's strengths include data acquisition, merging, and cleansing.  In addition, Needle's graph-based data organization can easily handle complex data structures that create nightmares in traditional relational databases, which require tabular data forms.  Needle, for example, can easily handle variable-length lists of items.  None of these strengths are applied to present the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 dataset.   Needle here merely makes the Ad Hoc DS1/DS3 data much more easily accessible, especially compared to data published as pages of tables in a pdf document.

Offer Comments

Based on data filed by the Ad Hoc Telecommunications Users Committee, tariff rates in 2009 for DS1 and DS3 special-access circuit elements across U.S. states have a spread equal to about plus and minus a third of the average.  Rates differ across bandwidth (DS1 or DS3), regulatory type (price cap or pricing flexibility), purchasing term commitment (in months from 1 to 60), and geographic zone (typically three zones).  Differences across states within these rate structures reflect other factors that affect tariff rates.

Rate differences across states are not highly correlated with state characteristics.  Qwest, for example, has the same DS1 and DS3 rates across its 14-state service territory.  AT&T and Verizon, in contrast, have tariffs that differ across state groups in ways that relate to the service territories of historic telephone operating companies.

Consider the highest and lowest DS1, price-cap, month-to-month, zone 1 rates as measured by the composite 10-mile circuit rate.  The highest such rate is $1023 in Indiana and Wisconsin (AT&T).  The lowest such rate is $395 across the whole 14-state Qwest service territory, which includes Minnesota and Iowa.   Differences in regulation, competition, service cost, or unmeasured differences in tariff structures could explain this dispersion.  What specifically explains the actual difference isn't obvious.

Differences between price-cap and pricing-flexibility rates also show considerable ambiguity.  Telephone companies are granted petitions for pricing flexibility based on criteria that the FCC established to measure the development of competition.[*]  The rate data indicate that pricing flexibility rates are consistently higher than price-cap rates.   Higher prices typically aren't associated with greater competition.  However, for most service attribute types, pricing flexibility rates have less dispersion across states than do price-cap rates.  That is consistent with more competition in circumstances in which unpriced differences across states matter little.

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Data: DS1 and DS3 rate statistics based on Ad Hoc Rate Dataset (Excel version); Ad Hoc DS1 and DS3 Rate Dataset

Note:

[*] An FCC order, adopted on Aug. 5, 1999, set out a procedure ("pricing flexibility" petitions) for removing rate elements from existing price-cap regulation.  BellSouth provides an example of the regulatory procedure.  On Dec. 15, 2000, the FCC's Common Carrier Bureau granted a BellSouth petition for pricing flexibility.  The order granting that petition apparently isn't online, but an affirming review of that order, which includes a list of the metropolitican statistical areas (MSAs) to which it applies, is online.   Here's a better formated version of the MSA list.  On Nov. 22, 2002, the Bureau adopted an order granting another BellSouth petition for pricing flexibility.  On May 16,2008, the Bureau granted a third BellSouth petition for pricing flexibility.

Offer Comments

Considering the merits of using automatic switches rather than human telephone operators to connect telephone calls, a Bell System technical expert in 1891 declared:

experience and observation have united to show us that an operation as complex as that of uniting two telephone subscribers' lines [connecting a telephone call] . . . can never efficiently or satisfactorily be performed by automatic apparatus, dependent on the volition and intelligent action of the subscriber.[*]

In short, telephone subscribers lack the discipline and skill needed to dial correctly telephone calls.  A human telephone operator is needed to connect telephone calls for them.

With the benefit of history, you know better than this telephone system expert.  He under-estimated the intelligence of most persons at the edges of telephone networks.  Most persons have proven to be quite capable of dialing telephone calls.

More generally, shifting service implementations (intelligence) to network edges has made the Internet a more powerful, general-purpose communication technology.

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[*] Bell System engineer Thomas Lockwood, quoted in Lipartito, Kenneth (1994) "Component Innovation: The Case of Automatic Telephone Switching, 1891–1920," Industrial and Corporate Change, v. 3, n. 2, p. 329, from AT&T Archive, Box 1286, Stowger Aut0matic Exchange Switching, Lockwood-Hudson letter, Nov. 4, 1891.

Offer Comments

From a New York Telephone advertisement in 1987:

Intellipath II Digital Centrex Service is the latest step in the continuing evolution of Centrex.  It's the first fully digital telecommunications system that requires no major switching equipment on your premises: it's in New York Telephone's central office.

Intellipath II offers 100 features: full-featured voice, full data transmission at up to 56 kbps with data call protection and a Centrex LAN option.  So you can have all the features of advanced on-premises systems without the headaches.

Like all Centrex telecommunications systems, Intellipath II frees you from the worries of maintenance and obsolescence.  New York Telephone monitors your system at its central office around the clock.  And we continually incorporate new technologies into our network as they are developed, and offer them to you -- to keep your system at the leading edge.

Best of all, you won't have to make a major capital investment.  With Intellipath II you pay for service as you use it.  You get a customized system at a competitive price.  [in Network World, July 20, 1987, p. 33]

That's the promise of cloud services more than two decades ago.  Telephone companies have grown mainly on the basis of selling connectivity (lines and minutes), not services to connected customers.  Changing from selling connectivity to selling services to connected customers is a difficult business change.

Offer Comments

Telephone services for small businesses is a significant segment of the communications industry.  SOHO (small office/home office) is a widely recognized customer segment.  The SOHO segment is large and growing relatively rapidly.  In the U.S. in 2002, non-farm businesses with fewer than ten employees and with more than $10,000 in annual receipts numbered about 14 million and had $2.7 trillion in business receipts (about 12% of total U.S. non-farm business receipts).   Small businesses that rent office space might also be able to contract with the facilities manager/owner for telephone services.  However, home-based small businesses don't have that contracting opportunity.  In the U.S. in 2002, non-farm, home-based firms with fewer than ten employees and with more than $10,000 in annual receipts numbered about 6.8 million and had about $700 billion in business receipts.  These home-based, small businesses are predominately in construction, retail trade, and professional, scientific, technical and other services.[1]

Small businesses value fancy voice telephone services.  Persons running small businesses have to manage communications with suppliers, customers, and contractors.   With respect to voice telephone communication, they benefit from services such as programmed greetings (attendant menus), flexible, programmed call routing across multiple devices and locations, call line hunt groups (if Jasmine's line is busy, automatically route the call to Sasha's line), and voice mail.   They also benefit from being able to manage these services personally from a variety of devices.  Large businesses have acquired such capabilities through private-branch exchanges (PBX) and Centrex systems.  Capital costs, skill requirements, and maintenance requirements probably favor a hosted PBX or Centrex-type system for small businesses.  U.S. businesses with less than 9 Centrex lines purchased about 2.8 million Centrex lines in 2002.   Those customers, who averaged 4.3 Centrex lines each, accounted for about 16% of total Centrex line purchases.[2]   Small businesses have long been significant customers of manageable voice telephone services.

Competition for providing communications services to small businesses is producing cheap, highly capable services.  For example, Junction Network's OnSIP provides hosted PBX service for small businesses.  Its $40 per month SOHO package offers unlimited short-number extensions, free, unlimited intra-extension calling, five voice mailboxes, three attendant menus, three hunt or simultaneous-ring groups, dial-by-name directories, business-hour routing of incoming calls, and a browser-based call management interface.  OnSIP describes itself as "a complete business VoIP service for 5 to 100 users."  The disadvantages of OnSIP for businesses with only a few persons appears to be cost and complexity.  Google Voice (an app pre-installed on the Nexus One) is a free service, designed for individual use, that has some capabilities similar to OnSIP.  VoxOx is another free service designed for individual use.  VoxOx offers a powerful virtual personal assistant as well as a dead-end feature that's probably even more valuable than industry-standard sorry-gotta-go scripting technologies.  BT's Ribbit provides a platform on which a wide variety of cost-effective, manageable voice telephone services can be developed.

Competition in providing manageable voice telephone services for individuals, non-employer businesses, and employer businesses with only a few employees is likely to reconnect the telephone business to the local advertising business.  AT&T introduced "Where to Buy It" telephone directories in 1928.  In 2007, U.S. Yellow Pages directories had about $14 billion in advertising revenue.  Moreover, about $71 billion of newspaper, radio, and television advertising is local advertising.[3]  Print yellow pages, newspapers, radio, and television are moving to networked digital devices.   Providing small business telephone services is likely to provide an important advantage in providing small-business advertising and local information search.  That's the historical story of the Yellow Pages.  That's a story that now seems ready to be re-enacted, but perhaps with different main characters.

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Data: U.S small businesses and Centrex services workbook (Excel version); coded Bell Atlantic / Verizon Centrex rate elements, 1998-2009, compiled from the full rate-detail dataset

Notes:

[1] The figures for home-based businesses are my estimates.  For the source, detailed data, and estimation formulas, see the small business worksheet in the Excel version of the small business/Centrex workbook.

[2] For data details, see the Centrex worksheet.

[3]  Radio, television, and newspaper advertising, separated into local and national, is available in the full Coen Advertising dataset.  Those figures show local radio advertising, local television (cable and broadcast) advertising, and local newspaper advertising to be 53% of total advertising.  The Coen over-all local/national advertising figures for 2007 show local advertising to be 34% of total advertising.  However, the Coen over-all local/national ad figures include all direct mail advertising and almost all miscellaneous advertising as national advertising.

Offer Comments

The Ultimate Hydrator

Deer Park brand natural spring water has no calories, and we do not add anything: no sweeteners, no caffeine, no sodium -- it's pure refreshment that quenches your thirst and replenishes your body.

Don't bother consulting a book of omens.  When bandwidth is sold like water, you'll know that the communications industry is prospering.

Offer Comments

Since the beginning of telephone service, telephone rates have depended on how the telephone will be used.  In the U.S. in 2007 , flat-rate single-line local telephone service for businesses was priced 90% more than the same telephone service for residential use.   The mark-up for business service over residential service has varied from 1989 to 2007.  Business service has typically been charged between 75% to 120% more than the corresponding residential service.

Business / residence rate differentiation was less about 1900.  Rates for flat-rate business local telephone service were typically 20% to 50% greater than the corresponding residential service.  Rates per local message were often the same for business and residential customers.  Different rates for residential and business customers were explained in 1902 in terms of the potentiality of the telephone:

there was a scale of graduated charges, varying with the character of the facilities provided, the length of the line required, and the amount of service rendered, so far as that was determined, so to speak, by the potentiality of the telephone; that is, whether it was at a residence or a place of business.[1]

A difference in pattern of use was also offered as an explanation:

It was felt that the more general distribution of the traffic from residence stations throughout the twenty-four hours, and the comparative freedom of this class of traffic from the liability to the violent fluctuations in volume characteristic of the service in purely business districts, justified this concession.[2]

This explanation indicates that business service had greater traffic-sensitive costs than did residential service.

Cost differences, however, are not a convincing explanation for the difference between business and residential telephone rates.  Traffic-sensitive telephone service costs, e.g. switching costs, surely have decreased relative to total telephone service costs over the past century.  Yet the markup of business telephone service over residential telephone service has roughly doubled over the past century.  Moreover, from 1989 to 2007, taxes, 911, and other charges were roughly twice as great for business telephone service as for residential telephone service.  These charges have little relation to traffic-sensitive costs.

Higher business telephone rates are probably more politically appealing than higher residential telephone rates.  Higher business telephone rates have effects that are diffused throughout the economy.  Voters pay directly higher residential telephone rates.   Business telephone rates probably rose relative to residential telephone rates over the past century via the invisible hand of the democratic process.

One interpretation of network neutrality is that network service rates should not depend on how the service is used.   Telephone rates historically have not followed such network neutrality.  The specification of acceptable  rate structures is an important and complex regulatory issue.

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Data: U.S. residential and business telephone rates, 1878 to 2007 (Excel version).  Extensive data on telephone rates, by city, c. 1912, are available in the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Reports, Telephones and Telegraphs, 1912 (GPO, 1915), Ch. VI.

Notes:

[1] U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Reports, Telephones and Telegraphs, 1902 (GPO, 1906), p. 52.

[2] Id. p. 54.  The report was "prepared from data supplied by Mr U. N. Bethell, vice president and general manager of the New York Telephone Company."  Both of the above explanations are probably from the New York Telephone Company.

Offer Comments

Plain-old, fixed-line telephone service is shrinking rapidly.  Consider US West, which became Qwest in 2000.   It is a large local exchange telephone company (a former regional Bell Operating Company) serving the northwestern and mid-western U.S.  US West - Qwest's fixed-line residential and business switched-access telephone lines grew 3.3% and 6.0% per year, respectively, from 1991 to 1999.   In contrast, residential and business telephone lines fell 5.7% and 4.6% per year, respectively, from 1999 to 2008.[1]  A  major reversal like this is probably typical of incumbent wireline telephone companies across the world.  It implies serious business difficulties.

Trends in sub-categories of telephone lines point to effects of technological innovation.  Because using a telephone line for dial-up Internet access doesn't permit simultaneously using that line for telephone service, dial-up Internet access was an important driver of growth in non-primary residential telephone lines in the late 1990s and early 2000s.  Non-primary residential telephone lines grew 9.9% per year from 1997 to 2001, compared to -0.4% growth in primary residential lines.   Home dial-up Internet access peaked at 40% of U.S. adults in 2001 and fell to about 8% of U.S. adults in 2008.[2]   From 2001 to 2008, non-primary lines fell 13.9% per year, while primary lines fell 6.2% per year.  A large share of the greater fall in non-primary lines comes from the shift from dial-up to broadband Internet access.

That non-primary telephone lines are more vulnerable to mobile-telephone (wireless) substitution probably also contributed to the more rapid fall in non-primary residential lines.  In 2008, non-primary residential lines accounted for only about 10% of residential telephone lines.  In multi-person households, wireline telephone lines are not personal telephone lines.  Mobile phones, in contrast, are almost exclusively personal telephones.  That's a valuable feature of a mobile phone.

Centrex lines feature in competition between an early cloud service (telephone company network service) and a local service (local private telephone system, called a PBX).  U.S. West - Qwest Centrex line counts fell 13.2% per year from 1999 to 2008.  These data do not mean that cloud services are losing in this field.  Incumbent telephone companies have fostered the development of "IP Centrex".   The fall in Centrex lines may reflect Qwest moving Centrex lines to Centrex-like services not subject to the regulations of traditional Centrex lines.

Centrex service, like telephone service more generally, now have a wide range of technical and business possibilities for service provision.  Bill Michael's 2001 article, "The New Centrex," describes the early jockeying for positions among a broad array of companies interested in Centrex-like services.   Now  Google Voice provides something like a personal PBX, while Amazon and a variety of other companies are offering cloud services.  While the future is uncertain, telephone companies that survive will surely become something other than traditional telephone companies.

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Data: US West - Qwest telephone lines, 1991-2008 (Excel version); US West - Qwest common-line basket rate detail, with relevant line codes and some state-by-state figures; ARMIS switched-access telephone line counts for US West - Qwest by state; US West Price and Demand Dataset, 1992-2009.

Notes:

[1] All the discussion and data in this post concerned switched-access telephone lines.   Among traditional telephone company services, switched-access lines are distinguished from "special access" lines.   Network configurations like a "leaky PBX" exploit that distinction.  The residential and business lines of concern here are lines that allow an end-user to make telephone calls on the public switched telephone network through use of their local telephone company's end-office switch.

[2] For figures for adult dial-up shares are from the Pew Internet's survey figures for trends in home internet access: broadband vs. dialup.  The Center for the Digital Future's Digital Future reports show 88% of U.S. internet users accessing the Internet via dial-up in mid-2000, compared to 16% accessing via dial-up early in 2009.

Offer Comments

Payments between interconnecting telephone companies distinguish between terminating and originating telephone call minutes.  You say let's talk tonight.  If I call you, my telephone company pays your telephone company per minute of our conversation.  If you call me, your telephone company pays my telephone company per minute of our conversation.   Telephone companies, and other companies providing voice communication services, thus care greatly about the "direction" of telephone conversations.

Communication, however, is fundamentally mutual, not directional.   Placing a telephone call is a type of request for attention. That has significant direction and often has highly asymmetric value across parties.  Time in communication, however, is not the same as a request for attention. I can't communicate with you if you won't communicate with me.   During a telephone conversation, either party is technically free to hang up at any time.  Within most telephone conversations, who called whom matters little.  The distribution of value within a continuing conversation depends on many factors other than who called whom.

Who calls whom has little significance for communications infrastructure cost.  The call direction relevant to payments between telephone companies is merely a convention associated with call set-up. Signaling outside of these network conventions ("Hey Bill, give me a call!" or digital non-telephone-network technologies that signal one telephone switch to initiate a call to another telephone switch) can easily reverse the conventional direction of a call.[*]  At a technical level within a modern, packet-based communications network, the predominate direction of network traffic depends on who talks more, not on who called whom.  More importantly, the direction in which most packets move has no significance for network cost.

From 1991 to 2008, U.S. incumbent local telephone exchange operating companies typically have reported roughly twice as many terminating telephone call minutes as originating call minutes.  Ignoring accounting associated with multi-person (conference) calls, every originating minute is always associated with one terminating minute.  Hence, for a bounded population communicating with each other, terminating telephone minutes necessarily equal originating telephone minutes. The imbalances in terminating to originating minutes probably come mainly from economic opportunities for competing or alternative communications infrastructure. At least historically, billing end-user customers has been more profitable than billing interconnecting telephone companies. Hence competitors have tended to target end-users with a relatively low ratio of terminating minutes to originating minutes. Similarly, non-telephone companies with their own communication infrastructure have saved more money by using their communications infrastructure to originate minutes than by using it to terminate minutes. The over-all effect is to skew incumbent local exchange carrier minutes toward terminating minutes.

The effect of telephone service competition on the ratio of terminating to originating minutes can be seen both across customer classes and across regions.   The Ameritech telephone operating company distinguishes its interstate switched access telephone minutes by whether those minutes are interconnected with a competitive access provider.  Public tariff data for Ameritech show that telephone minutes that Ameritech interconnects with a competitive access provider have a higher ratio of terminating minutes to originating minutes.  In public tariff data for demand years 1997 and 1998, the Nynex telephone operating company distinguished switched access telephone minutes interconnected in Lata 132 (New York City).  Lata 132, with a high density of persons and economic activity, has more competition among telephone companies than do other service areas.  Somewhat surprisingly, Nynex's switched access interconnected telephone minutes show roughly than the same terminating/originating ratio in Lata 132 and outside Lata 132.  However, originating minutes in Lata 132 declined 2.0% from 1997 to 1998, while originating minutes outside of Lata 132 grew 2.2%.  Within Lata 132 in 1998, Nynex multi-line business telephone customers had a 2.6 ratio of terminating to originating minutes, while single-line telephone customers had a ratio of 1.8.

Telephone companies' accounting of originating and terminating telephone call minutes is rather inconsistent.  The terminating / originating minute ratio has varied greatly across years.  For example Bell Atlantic reported a ratio of 0.88 for 1995, and 1.88 for 1996.  Ameritech reported a ratio of 1.61 for 2002, but 2.08 and 2.48 for 2001 and 2003, respectively.  Pacific Bell has reported a ratio below 1 from 1996, and Nevada Bell has reported a ratio below 1 from 1992.  Inconsistent reporting of terminating and originating telephone minutes is not surprising in light of the communicative and network superficiality of the terminating-originating distinction.

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Data: Online spreadsheet of U.S. local telephone companies' originating and terminating interstate switched access minutes (Excel version); coded dataset of Ameritech transport interconnection charge minutes, 1998-2009; coded dataset of Nynex switched access minute elements, 1998-1999

[*] An early example of reversing the conventional direction of calls was international callback.  In 2003, the FCC eliminated its comity-based prohibitions on call-back.

Offer Comments