Minor point, but don’t forget 847. which split off from 708 along with 630, in 1996.
As people have mentioned, cell phones never required the 1 first (but will work with the 1 first) because the entire number was entered before it was sent. This led to an interesting problem for me with my office phone in 2000 when cell phones were starting to proliferate.
My office phone was something like 805-562-3914. People in the 805 area would just dial 562-3914.
The phone number for the L.A. County Dept of Fish and Game was something like 562-391-4xxx where the xxx was a block of numbers for everyone who worked for the department. If someone forgot the 1 on their land line, they got me.
I would get two or three calls a week. They’d start to ramble about some question regarding duck hunting permits or something and I’d have to cut them off and tell them it was the wrong number. I’d explain that they forgot the 1 and they’d generally apologize and move on. Occasionally I’d get someone who wanted to argue with me and insist that they definitely did punch in the 1 and was wrong. Like wtf, dickhead, that’s the only possible way that you would have reached me.
Likely FCC or public utility commision (PUC) (state FCC) requirement - 1+ dialing on a landline is basically you agreeing to pay a long distance charge. I guess they could update things to complete a non-LD call even if you dial 1, but aside from the PITA that I imagine changing tariffs to be (and probably their billing and recording software), you’d have people claiming you charged them for a LD call and they thought it was local.
I’ve been on flat rate even on the landline for years now; but back when I was charged for long-distance but not for local calls, some of the areas classed as long-distance could be dialed with 7 digits; no 1, and no area code. You just had to know (or look up, it was in the phone book) which exchanges were local calls from your particular exchange.
We’ve had 10 digit dialing for 9 or 10 years now and I think we may have been one of the last Canadian provinces to require it.
I remember that, though I don’t think these were long-distance calls, but toll calls. There was, I think, a minimal charge, but it made my father unhappy.
I don’t think there was a difference; I remember those as just different words for the same thing (at least, presuming the subject being discussed was phone calls.)
As I recall, local long distance (same area code) cost significantly less than regular long distance.
The problem with running out of phone numbers or area codes means that the 10 available digits from which to construct those numbers just aren’t enough any more. We should all move to hexadecimal phone numbers and area codes.
I know someone who had a similar problem, though it was the phone number of an airline company. which was 1-800+local prefix+local number. So there was a subset of people that assumed that meant it was a local number and could forgo the 1-800 part. People would become really irate when we had to tell them that we could not do anything about their reservation.
As for me, I always store the numbers with a +1 because that indicates the country code and I have phone numbers for other countries with the appropriate country code listed as +## so I don’t have to dial the 011,or whatever when dialing those numbers.
//i\\
Relatively close calls cost less than further ones; but I don’t remember two neat categories with only two prices; I remember lots of possible price categories. And we used the term “long-distance calls” for all of them; though I recognize the phrasing “toll calls”.
There used to be three types of toll calls, each regulated differently.
Intra-LATA (this is complicated) It was not necessarily a whole area code but often places no more than 5-10 miles away that are still toll. The area covered by free local calling could be quite small.
Inter-LATA but Intrastate. This was regulated by state PUCs.
Interstate long distance. This was regulated by the FCC and FTC.
At one time the last one was the most expensive, but at some point on the late 1990s, early 2000s, the first two became more expensive because there was more or less free competition in the interstate market, but not in the intrastate or intraLATA markets. The lobbyists of local phone companies, whether subsidiaries of large regional BOCs (Bell Operating Companies, successors of original AT&T) or “independents”, were very effective for a while in keeping Sprint, MCI, AT&T and LDDS out of their local market.
In Canada, it least, it was a Bell thing. (I don’t know whether there was any sort of regulatory requirement.)
On a traditional phone call, you had to dial the 1 in front for a toll call. You had to omit the 1 in front for a local call. Toll cals were charged by the amount of time the call took, and quickly became expensive. Local calls were charged at a flat rate that didn’t change no matter how long you talked; in practice they were free, bundled with the monthly bill.
You could not dial a 1 in front for a local call, and you could not omit the 1 in front of a long-distance call. This was to enforce “mandatory toll alerting”, so that you would know whether you were about to pay the expensive long-distance rates.
The problem this led to was that you had to know what calls were local to your location. Dialling wrong in either way, with the 1 or without, led to an error message.
In a small town, like Whitby in the 1970’s, the phone book gave a list of what calls were local. (Toronto wasn’t, for example. Neither was the neighbouring town of Ajax, which led to me in high school riding my bike to the Whitby/Ajax town line and using a phone booth on the other side to make a local call to this girl I was interested in, instead of asking my parents for permission to make a long-distance call…)
Later, I lived in Mississauga. Calls to downtown Toronto, the centre of the megalopolis, were local. But often calls to nearby locations roughly the same distance from downtown weren’t local! And there was no way to know without trying, because things had gotten complicated enough that lists of local calls were hard to find.
Then cell phones and flat-rate dialling plans came out and shoved the whole concern aside.
But what they should have done was allow dialling the 1 on all calls. That would have signified, “I am willing to pay a toll if there is one. If there isn’t, because it’s a local call, great!” I wonder, though, whether the system was set up such that dialling a 1 meant you had to pay a toll. In such cases, maybe there was no toll defined for a local call.
Yes, but when you were 14 and hot after a girl in Ajax, would your parents have been happy with that? I have children that came of age just as texting became a thing (pre-smart phones, even). The middle son wracked up an impressive $100+ charge his first month (at $0.10 a message). AT&T wrote it off when we signed up for unlimited texts.
Interesting. They didn’t do it that way in New York State; and you could indeed dial a toll number without realizing that it wasn’t classed as a local call.
Somewhat off-topic: anyone remember the early days of cell phones, when your phone did not automatically work outside your home area?
I got my first cell phone in late 1994 (when I had my first child; the phone was the size of a smallish purse, and had an actual receiver you used to talk on!). When I visited my parents, I had to punch in some special code to make it work when I was in their state. The one time I tried, I don’t think I got it to work.
It’s MUCH easier now - as in, literally a non-issue.
That’s because the country was divided into service areas called “cells” and wireless service providers could bid for two slots in each “cells” to get a license to provide wireless service and build out their networks to serve their licensed areas. That’s why we still call it “cellular” telephone service in this country.
It was common for a long time for a service area to have two competitors, like USCellular and Cellular One.
Just as an update, I’m still dialing 7 digit numbers (no area code) and it’s still going through without errors.
I had forgotten about it. I called Kroger for my pickup yesterday and my phone still has the local number. It worked fine. If the change was publicized beyond the notice in the utility bill, it didn’t reach me. Maybe there is a grace period.
They changed where I am only a few years ago. Eventually you will get an error recording.