A Deceptive Practice? You Be The Judge....
One of the most heavily advertised of the
"10-10-"
calling plans touts that all calls up to twenty minutes are only 99¢. Sounds great. In fact, it
is
a very competitive rate of $0.0495 per minute; that's
if
(and only if), you talk for the
entire 20 minutes
.
Now suppose you use that same "10-10-" number to place a call, but instead of reaching the person you were intending to talk with, you get that person's answering machine or voicemail. Okay, so you take 30 seconds and leave your message. (Remember, all calls up to 20 minutes are
only
99¢!).
Can you see what happened to the cost of that call? This may be hard to believe, but talking for 30 seconds instead of the full 20 minutes caused the effective rate of that call to skyrocket from less than 5¢ per minute, to a whopping
$1.98
per minute!
Here's the math:
Divide $0.99 by 20 minutes = .99/20 = 4.95 cents per minute.
This is what you pay if you talk for the full 20 minutes.
Now divide $0.99 by 0.5 minutes (30 seconds) = .99/0.5 = 198 cents per minute. This is the effective rate if you talk for 30 seconds.
Do you really want to pay almost two bucks a minute for your long distance? Probably not, or you wouldn't have read this far. But there are some celebrities out there that want you to! Don't get chumped! Do some research and find out about different long distance providers and their rates -- I did. That's how I became an independent distributor for
AMERICAN TELECOM NETWORK
.
sm
ATN
sm
offers a fantastic rate of 4.9¢ a minute with 6-second billing on all state-to-state long distance calls, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We have business and personal 800 Numbers available at the same low rate, plus unlimited internet access for only $9.95! And as icing on the cake, we're giving away FREE CELL PHONES!
Click
HERE
to get yours!