I remember running a BBS and being surprised at the 20 or so users I had from Germany. When I caught one of them online I asked how they could afford the bill

I remember running a BBS and being surprised at the 20 or so users I had from Germany. When I caught one of them online I asked how they could afford the bill and was told he had hacked a PBX and was connected, somehow, through that. I hadn't heard of that trick back then (and don't know the specifics of it now). Long Distance was a horrible thing. In 1997, I was working for a CLEC/long distance provider that existed as a result of the 1996 "deregulation[0]". Times were great for about two years. The price for long distance was never perfect against cost, but when everything went flat rate/minute and that rate continued to drop (ultimately becoming flat rate, period), I remember sitting in an employee meeting hosted by the CEO of Frontier (pre-Global Crossing/Frontier and later Citizens/Frontier). He had a graph on the screen showing the cost of a minute of long distance and the price we could charge for it. The lines were converging and I asked the fateful question "what happens when they cross"? To which I received a political deflection[1]. The best part was all of the industry rags were, at the time, screaming that there will always be a long distance surcharge since there will always be call termination per-minute rates. I could see it was only a matter of time before those fellas were proven wrong. Younger folks, today, don't have any concept of domestic long-distance rates, but AFAIK (and I've been out of telecom for a little while now) call termination still has a per-minute cost. [0] In quotes because it wasn't so much a deregulation as it was changed regulation. The goal was to get local carriers to start competing with one another and long distance carriers. I believe the local carrier had to have a CLEC in their service area in order to provide their own long distance service. The hope was more competition with similar kinds of services. The result was a bunch of CLECs that figured out the law opened up some interesting opportunities. I remember a friend of mine setting up an ISP for the cost of equipment. He'd received his local phone numbers from a CLEC that would hand out locals that would cover a huge geographical area at practically no cost. What I didn't understand, then, was because call termination is the "cost" incurred by the LEC, inbound calls were pure profit. ISP lines were all inbound so the CLEC made buckets of money in pennies/minute from Ameritech/AT&T for the hours that his customers spent online. [1] The days after the 1996 telco bill were interesting. Competition opened up and a whole new set of operators started up doing things like offering lines to ISPs (most people were dial-up back then) practically for free since all of the calls would be inbound and result in a huge paycheck from Ameritech/AT&T or whomever was the major established local carrier.