Everyone in the PSTN world makes money on every call. When someone calls your home phone from somewhere else (next door, across the country, around the world), the amount paid for the call gets divided amongst all of the "real" phone companies handling the call.
Let's say a call costs 5 cents per minute. The caller pays his own phone company 5 cents for the call. That phone company keeps 1 cent for handling the billing and 1 cent for handling the origination of the call. They give 2 cents to the long distance phone company who carries the call to the other end and 1 cent to your phone company for terminating the call and handing it to you.
If you have flat rate service it doesn't mean that each call doesn't cost money. It just means that your phone company has calculated the average cost of a month's local calling and has included that amount in your basic service charge.
The folks who donate phone numbers to SIPBroker receive a small amount of money for each call they terminate. This, and their mention on the SIPBroker web site generate customers and revenue for resources that would otherwise go fallow.
IPKall is a good example of this. IPKall is a service of a Washington State telephone company. They purchase blocks of telephone numbers 1000 at a time. Obviously, they can't get subscribers 1000 at a time, so they put these dormant numbers to use in the meantime by offering them to us via IPKall.
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