4 ms·

Local calls have been unlimited on landlines in most US markets for a very long time.

by subway 8y ago

nanis 8y ago
> Local calls have been unlimited on landlines in most US markets for a very long time. For some definition of very long.
- Animats 8y ago
  Verizon's tariffs still offer a landline in New Jersey where you pay by the "message unit". Message units were once tallied by a mechanical counter for each line, and someone read the meters once a month.
DrScump 8y ago
Not so long at all. Into this century in California, at least, your Pacific Bell local calling area was something like 8 miles, and your "free" area was the collection of prefixes for which the nearest point for each prefix was within that distance. San Jose, for example, had 3 calling regions. Anywhere in Sunnyvale to SJ1 or SJ2 was local, but SJ3 wasn't. I set up message broadcast systems for groups (such that a 100-second message could be broadcast to a database of contacts, loadable from a CSV file). I wrote a program to parcel out which calls were local from each point. 2 parallel systems, one in Sunnyvale and another in SJ3, could cover from Menlo Park to southern Fremont to Monte Sereno to almost San Martin with no calling charges to over 700 recipients.
- subway 8y ago
  I'm not sure how this doesn't qualify as unlimited local calling? The situation in rural KY on GTE in the early 90s was quite similar -- I even remember using 3-way calling to bridge an aunt who lived a county in one direction with a grandmother a county in the other direction. For us, either was a local call, but for the aunt and grandmother to directly call each other was long distance.
  - DrScump 8y ago
    I'm not sure how this doesn't qualify as unlimited local calling? It just depends on how one defines "local". Nowadays, people assume your entire country at a minimum. 15 years ago, it was 10 miles or so. It was the mobile era and its inherent independence of landline tariffs that changed things. For three generations, Ma Bell subsidized local calling and infrastructure with long distance charges; the MCI court case and the subsequent breakup of Ma Bell blew that apart.

Local calls have been unlimited on landlines in most US markets for a very long time.

by subway 8y ago

Local calls have been unlimited on landlines in most US markets for a very long time.

> Local calls have been unlimited on landlines in most US markets for a very long time. For some definition of very long.

Animats 8y ago
Verizon's tariffs still offer a landline in New Jersey where you pay by the "message unit". Message units were once tallied by a mechanical counter for each line, and someone read the meters once a month.

DrScump 8y ago

Not so long at all. Into this century in California, at least, your Pacific Bell local calling area was something like 8 miles, and your "free" area was the collection of prefixes for which the nearest point for each prefix was within that distance. San Jose, for example, had 3 calling regions. Anywhere in Sunnyvale to SJ1 or SJ2 was local, but SJ3 wasn't. I set up message broadcast systems for groups (such that a 100-second message could be broadcast to a database of contacts, loadable from a CSV file). I wrote a program to parcel out which calls were local from each point. 2 parallel systems, one in Sunnyvale and another in SJ3, could cover from Menlo Park to southern Fremont to Monte Sereno to almost San Martin with no calling charges to over 700 recipients.

subway 8y ago
I'm not sure how this doesn't qualify as unlimited local calling? The situation in rural KY on GTE in the early 90s was quite similar -- I even remember using 3-way calling to bridge an aunt who lived a county in one direction with a grandmother a county in the other direction. For us, either was a local call, but for the aunt and grandmother to directly call each other was long distance.
- DrScump 8y ago
  I'm not sure how this doesn't qualify as unlimited local calling? It just depends on how one defines "local". Nowadays, people assume your entire country at a minimum. 15 years ago, it was 10 miles or so. It was the mobile era and its inherent independence of landline tariffs that changed things. For three generations, Ma Bell subsidized local calling and infrastructure with long distance charges; the MCI court case and the subsequent breakup of Ma Bell blew that apart.