How come with most calling plans from any of the big phone service providers it’s more expensive to make an in-state long distance call than an out of state one?
Now is the time for all good men to come the the aid of their gazorninplatt.
Uhh, maybe because they make more money that way ?
Oh, you don’t need to use all-caps. We can read the smaller letters without glasses.
I really hate that. Calling a place 30 miles away costs more than a place 3,000 miles away? What the F*** is that S*** ?
I believe that’s because those calls (I’ve heard them referred to as “local long-distance”) traditionally haven’t experienced the competition that “real” long-distance calls have. I don’t think you have the option of selecting your local-long-distance carrier.
Of course, as other options such as cell phones become more viable competition begins to appear from other directions.
We finally got a plan through MCI where all in-state and out-of-state calls, any time, are 5 cents a minute. $8.95 a month. We compared phone bills for a couple of months before signing up for it. Figure it might save us $10 a month or so.
Long distance carriers traditionally do not have local service capabilities, although that is rapidly changing. Judge Green, the Yoko Ono of telecommunications, restricted AT&T (and by default, MCI, Sprint and the other LD competitors) from local service when the Bell System was broken up. AT&T never really did provide local service, if you wanted to make a call from NYC to Buffalo, that was courtesy of New York Telephone, and possibly a half dozen other companies in between who actually provided the physical facilities for the call. Some of these companies were owned by AT&T, some were not. All added to the bill though. It is still more or less true today.
I think it has something to do with the fact that interstate calls are regulated by the federal government, but intrastate calls are only regulated by the state governments.