"You send my husband away from his family for a year and then you can't even cover the cost of a 15 minute .. phone call?"Posted on: September 7, 2007 - 11:57am by Aaron Glantz
Media watcher Mathew Lasar writes on his Lasar Letter blog that the FCC is currently reviewing how much it should cost for a soldier call home from Iraq. After wading through thousands of pages of public comment, he writes "In this age of broadband, satellite, and VoIP, it should not cost any of our soldiers a thin dime to call their spouse, child, mother or father before a patrol in south Baghdad. Not even a penny."
Lasar quotes extensively from letters sent to the FCC by the spouses and parents of servicemen and women stationed abroad:
"You mean to tell me that you send my husband away from his family for a year," one asked the FCC, "and then you can't even cover the cost of a 15 minute long distance phone call to the soldiers family?"
The internet is also a problem, family members wrote, back at home and in Iraq.
"In order for him to have internet in his room in Iraq we pay 70 for it to only work about 1/2 the time. . . . " a spouse wrote to the FCC in March. "We spend about 150 dollars a month in calling cards for him to call home. So we use the internet and telephone to communicate. The separation pay we get is all spent on phone cards plus some of our pockets."
If you want to tell the FCC how much you think soldiers in Iraq should pay to talk with their family, you can write to:
[email protected]uhc comment: I worked in the telephone business for 21 years. The phone company's cost to provide one minute of telephone service? The embedded cost to the telco: $0.008 per minute. 8/10 of one penny.
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