In the days of yore, phone calls were free (after monthly service fees) within only your own area code or even one of the many Local Area and Transport Area (LA

In the days of yore, phone calls were free (after monthly service fees) within only your own area code or even one of the many Local Area and Transport Area (LATA) within your area code if covering a very large geographical expanse of your area code. This is how Bell carriers make their money: long distance (inter-area-code) and LATA (intra-area-code) calls for larger metro areas. And often times, phone calls were free to your neighbors who are just immediately across your LATA/area-code boundary. BBS folks who borders within their LATA often take advantage of free calling to their neighbor LATA running BBS and set up FIDOnet to relay their users’ BBS messages across the area code for free thereby connecting two entire area codes together using these “LATA pair of BBS” as a bridge. Soon, we were able to send messages across the nation … for free. That was only significant when making a call across area code boundary was considered a very expensive long distance call. https://www.att.com/support/smallbusiness/article/smb-local-long-distance/KM1191593/ https://www.att.com/support/smallbusiness/article/smb-local-...