What you really have is conferencing using a very cheap equivalent of a 900 number -- a number where the user pays by the minute and some of that money is paid to the recipient of the call. Except it's an invisible 900 number, an artifact of the rural telco rates, one which, because of its invisibility has been callable on unlimited and flat rate LD plans.

But you would not expect any LD company to include free calling to 900 numbers -- mostly because they are usually quite expensive, thanks in large part to the receiving telcos. Why does the fact that these numbers are 6 cents/minute make a difference?

I'm not fond of the carriers blocking numbers. It isn't a great precedent. But these receiver-tolls (both the cheap ones in cities and the expensive ones in rural areas) are what's sitting in the way of making telephony free (as in not charged by the minute.)

The right way is the internet way. The receiver, which is to say the customer, should pay to receive calls from the network. Since this cost is in fact very low, almost every phone customer would actually get this for a flat rate, simply as part of the cost of having a phone number/line. (Though note that I, and many other VoIP customers, actually elect to pay by the minute. That's because our cost is around $1/month per number and 1 cent/minute of use, which usually works out to quite a bit less than the flat rates offered on the PSTN. Though right now I don't know why we pay at all since the CLECs that sell us these numbers are getting paid on incoming LD calls, thus making money both ways. Some, like ipkall, don't do this.)

Likewise, the maker of calls should pay for their connection to the network, again probably a flat fee but they can of course negotiate per-minute rates from their providers that get them to the handoff to the target.

If this were in place, you would have a real freeconference, rather than the fake one we're talking about here.