Tom Esvlin points out that the former SBC sued the former AT&T in 2004 over much the same issue the current combined SBC+AT&T+Cingular is suing other telcos:

The complaint alleges: “… AT&T orchestrated and implemented a fraudulent scheme to avoid tariffed ‘access charges’ by delivering its long-distance calls for termination over facilities that AT&T obtained under the express condition that they be used for local traffic, and thereby disguising its long-distance calls as local calls.”

Now at&t is alleging that FuturePhone calls are being described as domestic long distance when they’re really international.

Local? Long distance? International? Why’s it important anyway? Not because of actual costs. Costs on the Internet over which these calls are being routed isn’t sensitive to distance at all; and, truth to tell, other than international tariffs and other monopoly rents, switching costs and not distance are the main cost component on POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service). Certainly the cost to terminate a call on a local network has nothing to do with where that call originated.

— at&t and FuturePhone – POTS Calls the Kettle Black, by Tom Esvlin, Fractals of Change, February 2007

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