From: "Steven J. Sobol" <sjsobol@nacs.net>
Ameritech offers the same service, and I've only been charged for the times
I've actually used the feature. If I hang up, I don't get charged. I have to
believe BellSouth works the same way, although I could be wrong.
Ameritech doesn't offer it here in Michigan, so I don't know what
problems there are.
In Mississippi, it works like this: Busy tone is replaced by a voice
message saying something like "Your party is currently busy. If you
would like to call again, press 1 or hold the line."
If you hold the line too long (30 seconds?), or you redial a number with
a 1 in it (several of our hunt groups have a 1 in them), you get charged
$.75...
But nobody has gotten phone bills yet, so we don't know how bad the
financials are.
The support calls are all folks trying to kindly tell us that our phone
lines have stopped working, because of the messages shown by the modem
software, which expects a busy signal.
And if you call BellSouth to complain, they tell you to signup for
BellSouth.Net 
WSimpson@UMich.edu
Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32
So they break the tele for modems and tell the customer that the only
solution is to use them as their ISP? If SBC tried this, with pacbell.net,
I'd be on on the phone to the FCC, the CPUC, my congress-critter, and my
lawyer, not necessarily in that order. I think they call that
anti-competitive practice by a monopoly. This is pretty egregious, why
haven't we heard more about this, is it a new thing? More curious, how can
an RBOC be that dumb?
Ameritech started to do something like this.
If you dial and get RNA, after a certain number of rings,
it will say "press 1 if you want to leave a message"
- jared
> From: "Steven J. Sobol" <sjsobol@nacs.net>
> Ameritech offers the same service, and I've only been charged for the times
> I've actually used the feature. If I hang up, I don't get charged. I have to
> believe BellSouth works the same way, although I could be wrong.
>
Ameritech doesn't offer it here in Michigan, so I don't know what
problems there are.
In Mississippi, it works like this: Busy tone is replaced by a voice
message saying something like "Your party is currently busy. If you
would like to call again, press 1 or hold the line."
This is how it works in Cleveland.
You dial and get a busy signal. Computer voice plays over the busy signal,
saying "Let Automatic CallBack redial for you. To use this feature, at
a cost of seventy-five cents, press 1."
If you hold the line too long (30 seconds?), or you redial a number with
a 1 in it (several of our hunt groups have a 1 in them), you get charged
$.75...
Yeah. That's stupid. Ameritech doesn't give you that option, thankfully.
And... you get the busy signal *first*, a couple seconds before the voice,
which should be enough time for modems to detect a Busy.
You work in the industry - why do you even feel the need to ask that
question? You know the answer 
(Yes, that was a cheap shot.)
Yes, but.
Getting a no-answer message from the modem, when the other end isn't
answering, is fine.
Getting a no-answer message from the modem, when the other end is busy, isn't
cool. And it will confuse a lot of customers who do not know better.