So here was an interesting anecdote from years past. During the heyday of CompuServe and its ilk, living in the UK where long distance calls, e.g. greater than

So here was an interesting anecdote from years past. During the heyday of CompuServe and its ilk, living in the UK where long distance calls, e.g. greater than about 7 miles radius, was prohibitively expensive, and with the introduction of a flat rate single payment of around 20p for a local call sometime in the late 80's or early 90's, no matter how long the call lasted, the trick to doing downloads was to call into a local compuserve number at 2400bps, which was charged at a lower rate than their faster lines, put all of the stuff you wanted into your "download basket", e.g. files, news, email, etc. Then hang up, and place a long distance call to one of their 9600bps lines to make the download as quickly as you could. There was also the trick of making every call a local call (when British Telecom still used the old crossbar systems rather than the newer switching networks) if you knew how to dial all the single digit area codes between you and the number you wanted to call. Pentyrch (the town) to Penarth (the town) was not a local call, at a distance of about 20 miles, but you could dial 5 for Radyr (about 2 miles), pause, then dial 3 for Fairwater (another 2+ miles), and so forth, until you reached the local exchange in Penarth, and then could send the actual phone number. Unfortunately each area, to dial another exchange, had different numbers, so Pentyrch to Radyr might be 5, but Taffs Well to Radyr might be 9. People on BBS's would exchange area code lists and exchange routing lists like they were precious commodities. Dialing through to London over a great distance using single digit exchange codes wasn't possible though, because London had a more modern telephone system, and you were limited by the number of digits you could send before the first exchange system would timeout and drop your call.