Long-distance calling
In towns too small to support a phone office, placing long-distance calls was a sideline for some businesses with telephones, such as pharmacies.
In some countries, such as Canada and the United States, long-distance rates were historically kept artificially high to subsidize unprofitable flat-rate local residential services.
[citation needed] Intense competition between long-distance telephone companies narrowed these gaps significantly in most developed nations in the late 20th century.
On August 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made a call via the telegraph line between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, eight miles (thirteen kilometres) distant.
In 1891, AT&T built an interconnect telephone network, which reached from New York to Chicago, the technological limit for non-amplified wiring.
Such transcontinental calling was made possible in 1914 but was not showcased until early 1915, as a promotion for the upcoming Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in the spring of the same year.
[3] On January 25, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell ceremonially initiated the first transcontinental telephone call from 15 Dey Street in New York City, which was received by his former assistant Thomas A. Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco.
This process, nevertheless, involved five intermediary telephone operators and took 23 minutes to connect by manually patching in the route of the call.
"On Oct. 9, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked by telephone to each other over a two-mile wire stretched between Cambridge and Boston.
[6] The first subscriber trunk dialing in the United Kingdom was deployed December 5, 1958 with Elizabeth II placing a call from Bristol to Edinburgh.
Thus, when TAT-1 was opened for service, it was connected to international gateway offices at White Plains, NY, and London that were already automated for domestic calls.
These were designed to be able to automatically switch outward and inward international circuits as soon as common signalling standards (and political considerations) could be negotiated.
Improvements in switching technology, the deployment of high-capacity optical fibre and an increase in competition substantially lowered long-distance rates at the end of the 20th century.
[citation needed] Using the Internet, the distinction between local and long-distance communication is fading to the point where an Internet call from the United States to Beijing carries a lower wholesale cost than a domestic landline call to a rural independent in small-town Iowa.
[citation needed] "Calling Packages" and "Internet Phoning" (VOIP) were cited as a contributing factor towards "Swiftly Ending a High-Cost Category" in 2004.
Joe Friday (Jack Webb) places an operator assisted person-to-person long-distance call to a number reached via a manual switchboard in Fountain Green, Utah, a town of several hundred people served by an independent telephone company.
This dramatization illustrates the cumbersome, costly, and time-consuming process needed for long-distance calling before direct distance dialing was available.
This routing would allow the Los Angeles operator to dial via the tandem switch (i.e., class-4 telephone switch) to the Mount Pleasant operator's switchboard, and have the call come in on a special trunk (designated by the 181 code) used for incoming calls to ring-down points (places with manual service whose connection to the national network was via a larger point).
For example, if by the late 1950s, Fountain Green had upgraded its manual service with an automatic (dial-enabled four-digit number) system, an operator could often dial the call after obtaining the rate and route.
The regulatory structure in British Telecom exchanges differs from the North American system as there are no free local calls.
Often these same services are available from a mobile phone by the use of a special access number, though in this case there may be a charge equivalent to that of a standard landline call.
In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission forced AT&T to allow MCI to connect their own long-distance lines into the Bell system.
[12] During the 1984 breakup of the Bell System, the local access and transport area or LATA concept was created to distinguish between in-region calls (which were handled by local telephone companies such as the Baby Bells) and out-of-region calls (handled by interexchange carriers such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint).
In feature group 'D', the current system, subscribers may dial the prefix "10" and a three-digit code identifying a long-distance carrier to handle the InterLATA call.
