Now That I Know How to Talk, Whom Should I Call?

Now That I Know How to Talk, Whom Should I Call?

These days, you can pick up your home phone and call almost anywhere on the planet. Although the cost for long-distance calls has fallen a lot over the past 10 years or so, it still costs a little money to call someone far away. However, most local telcos let you make local phone callsat least calls that they define as "local"without charging extra cash for making the call.

Many ISPs allow you to connect to their networks using modems, but the trick is to keep the cost down. To keep the costs down, ISPs try to make sure that as many people as possible can make a local free phone call to one of their routers. ISPs strategically locate routers in various parts of the world so that you can make a local call from your house to a phone number of a phone line that runs into the building where the ISP puts its gear. That type of building, and the gear inside it, is called a point of presence (POP), as shown in Figure 16-5.