Cost is relative

Back in 1988 when I used to run my Bulletin Board System I was unfortunate in that the host system was located in the United States, and the maximum speed of the modem was 2400 bits per second.  As a result I had to make fifteen or twenty minute calls to the USA to get software, such as new doors for the board or indeed new revisions to the BBS software itself.

At this point in time (pre-Optus in fact) the cost to call USA was $1.79 a minute peak, $1.19 a minute off-peak (after about 10pm to about 7am, Australian time).  I ended up becoming the Australian distributor of the BBS software (fat lot of good that actually did me, in reality) so was the main gateway of stuff from the USA into Australia.

So after a few months of doing this, it arrived.  That is: the phone bill.  At this point in time they were sent every three months to private subscribers.

Opening it up I knew it would be large.  A twenty minute call would cost maybe $25 or even $35 if I hadn't waited to off-peak hours.  And I'd made quite a few of them.

I couldn't believe it when I opened the bill and it was a whopping $750!!!  Since most of the calls were international, even then they were itemised, so I went through it with a calculator and added them all up.  And despite it not looking anything like $750 when you looked at the individual calls, it sure enough added to the given total.  (Gee these computers are good at arithmetic).

As a full-time university student on TEAS (Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme - the forerunner to Austudy) which was at the time, even less than the dole, there was going to be a little bit of trouble paying the bill.

The time for paying the bill came and went, and the inevitable happened, of course, Telecom cut the phone off, putting the BBS off the air.  Eventually thanks to cries out to my users, some of whom generously chipped in with small contributions, a loan from my girlfriend and a loan (which ended up becoming a grant) from my Mum, I managed to pay the bill.

So I applied to get the phone re-connected.  All was fine until after a few days there was still no dial tone on the line, so I rang up and made enquiries.  It seems that since my account had been delinquent, Telecom required a $250 security deposit before they'd re-connect the phone.  The hadn't told me about this at all when I applied for reconnection after paying the bill.  And if they had, I'd say the full cost of reconnection would have been apparent, ie $1,000, not $750!  So in order to recommence, I had to fork out another $250 after I'd had so much trouble scraping together $750...

After another couple of weeks I managd to pay the security deposit and the BBS was back on the air, finally!

Now I look at call costs to the USA, and if you shop around it's possible to get these same calls for 6c a minute!  Plus the modems we are using now are twenty or thirty times faster; although I'd in reality be using ADSL to do the file transfers at probably sixty or seventy times faster at no actual call cost above the monthly subscription fee!!!  I was using telecommunications far too early, it seems!