Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!UCONNVM.BITNET!SEWALL
From: SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (Murph Sewall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: 1-900 BBS
Message-ID: <8908121653.aa22438@SMOKE.BRL.MIL>
Date: 12 Aug 89 20:40:26 GMT
References: 
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 41

>be advertising this much if there wasn't money to be made on them.  Here are
>the rates to have a 900 number:
>
>$1200 installation fee (flip a couple of switches I imagine)
>$1000 per month
>$0.30 per minute collection fee
>
>You get to charge up to $2 per minute for the first minute and $1 per minute
>for subsequent minutes.  This would mean it would take several hundred minutes
>per month to pay the monthly costs of the service and anything beyond that
>would be profit I guess.

That IS the general idea.  At the moment most of the profit is being made by
976 (heavy breathing) numbers.

>Would anybody call such a BBS (would have to be single-line I suppose)?

I've never thought ANY 900 service worthy of the "rational economic man,"
but P.T.Barnum was right -- there's probably a 'sucker' out there to call a
900-BBS every minute (at least until the first month's bill arrives).

Seriously, 'portal' charges only $10 a month for basic service (mail but
no permanent storage) and PC Pursuit during 'off-peak' hours is $25 a month.
So, for $35 a month it's possible to have access to all 3 Mbytes a day
of USENET messages and software plus email to the World (in addition to
the as yet unpublicized but useable comserve.com gateway I documented here
a couple of weeks ago, I've discovered a similar mcimail.com which also is
open -- free from here to there but with standard MCI Mail charges from
there to here).  Using a 900-BBS to any degree apparently would cost a
great deal more than PC Pursuit to 'portal.'  Isn't 'pro-carolina'
accessible by PC Pursuit anyway?

Murph Sewall                       Vaporware? ---> [Gary Larson returns 1/1/90]
Prof. of Marketing     Sewall@UConnVM.BITNET
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    The opposite of artificial intelligence is genuine stupidity!
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