Free International Phone Calls From Iowa Are History

A longtime reader suggested a followup to this blog's post from last October called Make Free International Phone Calls From Iowa.

As it turns out, the "free" international phone calls from Iowa thing was a scam. This is from Christopher Herot's blog:

Last month I wrote about the loophole in the telecom settlement scheme whereby companies such as AllFreeCalls could strike deals with CLECs in sparsely populated regions to split the higher-than-normal termination charges they collected from ILECs. A lot of people speculated that this scheme only succeeded because the amounts being paid were still round-off errors in the grand scheme of the ILECs costs. Apparently AT&T noticed when their monthly bill from the Superior Telephone Co-operative in Iowa went from $2,000 to $2,000,000 and they have sued in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa. Their argument is that since the calls aren't really terminated in Iowa, they don't owe Iowa's termination charges.

There's even more detail on this issue, particularly with Futurephone, at the Gigaom blog.

You can also read a PDF of the lawsuit thanks to the Herot blog.

This blog was hoping that Chet Culver could have raided the IPERS pension fund and "invested" some of that money into hi-tech start-'em-up businesses like Futurephone in order to allow Iowa to become the Silicon Valley Of The Midwest. Oh, well, maybe Chet Culver can raid the IPERS pension fund and buy a few shares of the latest McLeodUSA scam.

Now, for your entertainment: