The US Federal Communications Commission is moving to batter down the profiteering prices charged by monopoly national telephone companies for international calls. It has set a range of accounting rate guidelines for calls from Europe at between $0.23 and $0.39 per minute and for Asia and other regions between $0.39 and $0.60, well under current charges, Reuter reports. The accounting rate is what a telephone company charges for completing a call originated with another carrier and is part of the overall toll charge. The guidelines are not prescribed rates but are benchmarks to help US international carriers in negotiating reductions in accounting rates with foreign carriers, adding that in most of 90 countries covered in a study, calls billed in the foreign country to the US were more than 30% higher than calls billed in the US to that country. The Commission said it expected high foreign rates would account for a 1992 global telephone deficit of $4,000m. It asked major carriers of overseas traffic in the US to file progress reports on efforts to negotiate lower global rates.
