Metroliner telephone article 4087

This is a very interesting contrast between the phone systems here and in Brazil:

1. When I have visited even very remote places, some people have DSL over their phone lines. One place was so remote that 3 years ago, their "phone line" wasn't a real line, but the phone jack went out the wall, into an aplifier, and up to a radio antenna which was linked to the central office by way of microwave signal 15 miles away - that was the "land line" at this place. 3 years ago, Sercomtel decided to install actual copper wire where possible to such places (I believe some state of Paran‡ money was involved for rural communication improvements). Today, this same farm house has DSL and faster internet service than I have here in the USA.

2. Public phones are popular in Brazil. However, they do not use pay phones because they are too expensive to maintain. Instead, they are operated with a card that is similar to American money: paper with a little magnetic strip hidden inside it. Insert the card into the phone and talk for however many units are available on the card. Depending on the calling plan, this can actually be cheaper than having a phone line in your house.

3. Cell phones: most cell phones are treated like a long distance call here in the USA: the person who makes the call pays for the call. This discourages telemarketers and other such nonsense from calling them.

4. The 10 digit dialing nonsense doesn't exist, for the most part. City codes exist so the areas are a bit localized. Also, when certain cities in Brazil needed more phone numbers, rather than do area code swapping, moving, and adding, all they did was add another digit to make 8 digits. For example, suppose my phone number 456-7890 in a city. During one of my visits they were transitioning one of the cities into having more numbers available, and so in this particular city they added another digit. All existing numbers had a 3 added in front of them, so under this new system my number would be 3456-7890. Thus, no city codes needed to be changed or added to increase the amount of phone numbers by a significant amount.

5. All cell phone numbers are 8 digit numbers that start with 9, no matter where they are located (7 digit city or 8 digit city for land lines). This lets the caller know they are going to be billed for the call, and identifies the number to anyone looking at it that it is a cell phone number.

-- -Glennl The despammed service works OK, but unfortunately now the spammers grab addresses for use as "from" address too! e-mail hint: add 1 to quanbreasty after gl to get 4317.