"""One of the concepts that has run through phone regulation for years was that the price of local service should relate to how many people you can reach in you

"""One of the concepts that has run through phone regulation for years was that the price of local service should relate to how many people you can reach in your local calling area. So the people in cities where it is cheap to offer phone service have been paying high bills to subsidize low rates for people in the country.""" The original rationale for this was to help spread telephone service to those parts of the country where it was more expensive to build out. This actually made sense since phones are much less useful if significant portions of the population don't have access to them. That this policy outlived it's usefulness to the extent it did is somewhat surprising.