2007-01-27 13:48:15 · 4 answers · asked by 11 1 in Consumer Electronics ➔ Cell Phones & Plans
It works just like insurance.
They get thousands and thousands of people to pay for it.
But they do noy all call to the point that the cost-benefit ratio is wrong.
Therefore they make a profit off of it.
2007-01-27 13:52:54 · answer #1 · answered by someone on earth 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Voice data is such a small amount of the traffic on internet wires that it has become back ground noise.
The undersea cables and other infrastructure carries voice and data together. The voice has guaranteed bandwidth so it does not get delayed. After the data connections it splits off into the phone switch and usually onto copper wire pairs that go to your home.
I designed a SONET communication chip that was able to carry all the voice traffic in California in one device if you could pass all the traffic to it.
A phone call is 64K bits per second. One OC-192 SONET pipe is 40,000,000,000 bits per second. With 4 of these interfaces I could carry one million, eight hundred and seventy five thousand conversations.
2007-01-27 13:56:21 · answer #2 · answered by Ron H 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The company trades the money they get from long-distance calls for getting more customers. It's a risk that can pay off big time for cell phone companies.
2007-01-27 13:52:32 · answer #3 · answered by JJ 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
They probably use something over the internet to route them very cheaply.
2007-01-27 13:51:26 · answer #4 · answered by kissmymiddlefinger 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋