Long-distance calling

London MCI Communications Long-distance operator

In telecommunications, a long-distance call (U.S.) or trunk call (also known as a toll call in the U.K.) is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are typically charged a higher billing rate than local calls. The term is not necessarily synonymous with placing calls to another telephone area code.

Long-distance calls are classified into two categories: national or domestic calls which connect two points within the same country, and international calls which connect two points in different countries. Within the United States there is a further division into long-distance calls within a single state (intrastate) and interstate calls, which are subject to different regulations (counter-intuitively, calls within states are usually more expensive than interstate calls). Not all interstate calls are long-distance calls. Since 1984 there has also been a distinction between intra-local access and transport area (LATA) calls and those between different LATAs, whose boundaries are not necessarily state boundaries.

Before direct distance dialing (DDD), all long-distance calls were established by special switchboard operators (long-distance operators) even in exchanges where calls within the local exchange were dialed directly. Completion of long-distance calls was time-consuming and costly as each call was handled by multiple operators in multiple cities. Record keeping was also more complex, as the duration of every toll call had to be manually recorded for billing purposes.

In many less-developed countries, such as Spain, Mexico, Brazil, and Egypt, calls were placed at a central office the caller went to, filled out a paper slip, sometimes paid in advance for the call, and then waited for it to be connected.[1] In Spain these were known as locutorios, literally "a place to talk". In towns too small to support a phone office, placing long-distance calls was a sideline for some businesses with telephones, such as pharmacies.

In some countries, such as Canada and the United States, long-distance rates were historically kept artificially high to subsidize unprofitable flat-rate local residential services.[citation needed] Intense competition between long-distance telephone companies narrowed these gaps significantly in most developed nations in the late 20th century.

The cost of international calls varies dramatically among countries. The receiving country has total discretion in specifying what the caller should be charged (by the originating company, who in a separate transaction transfers these funds to the destination country) for the cost of connecting the incoming international call with the destination customer anywhere in the receiving country. This has only a loose, and in some cases no, relation to the actual cost. Some less-developed countries, or their telephone company(s), use these fees as a revenue source.


Site of one end of the first US long-distance telephone call in 1876 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Another early call between cities had been made in Canada by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.[2]




— New York Times, Jan 26, 1915.[4]

On November 10, 1951, the first direct dial long-distance telephone call in North America was placed from Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey to Mayor Frank Osborne of Alameda, California via AT&T's Bell System.[5] The ten digit call (seven digits plus a three-digit area code) was connected automatically within 18 seconds.[6]

The first subscriber trunk dialing in the United Kingdom was deployed December 5, 1958 with Elizabeth II placing a call from Bristol to Edinburgh.[7]

International calling


International direct dialling from London to Paris was first offered in March 1963, with Amsterdam following by the end of 1963. Simultaneously, operator-dialed transatlantic calling began March 30, 1963 with the originating international operator in Western Europe or the US able to complete calls to the terminal station without further operator assistance via the gateway exchanges at White Plains, NY and London.[8] Operator-dialed transpacific calling to Hawaii, Japan, and Australia began with the completion of the Commonwealth Pacific Cable System (COMPAC)cable, also in 1963.[8]

By mid-1968, transatlantic cable capacity had increased to the point where scheduling calls between Western Europe, the UK, and the US was no longer necessary and calls were completed on demand. Transatlantic international direct dialing between New York City (212 area code) and London (01 STD code) was introduced in 1970,[9] with service extended to the whole of the US and the six largest UK cities in 1971.[10]

Collect/reverse-charge calling


Technical problems



In media

Dramatization of a long-distance call circa 1949

In this excerpt from the radio series Dragnet, Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) places a person-to-person long-distance call to a number reached via a manual switchboard in Fountain Green, Utah – a town of several hundred people served by an independent telephone company. In the call, Friday calls a long-distance operator in Los Angeles and gives the name and number of the called party. The operator then calls a rate-and-route operator, who responds that the call should be routed through Salt Lake City and Mount Pleasant, Utah, and that the rate-step for the call is 140 (the long-distance operator would mark her ticket with that rate-step, and could use it to quote the rate from her rate table, in terms of the first three minutes and each additional minute, if the caller requested the toll).


This dramatization (and others like it) illustrates the cumbersome, costly and time-consuming process needed for long-distance calling before direct distance dialing was available. Local calls within the Los Angeles area had long been direct dial, but a long-distance call to a tiny town in a distant state was a complex manual effort. The caller would dial the long-distance operator (typically ‘110’ or ‘211’ in large Bell System cities of that era; ’0’ was for local assistance) and provide the destination city name and called number as well as their own number for billing purposes (there was no automatic number identification). Before the era of operator-assisted dialing, which began in the late 1940s, an operator would first set up the route, then ring back the original caller several minutes later to announce the call was ready, rather than having him or her remain on the line.

Once operator distance dialing was implemented, the operator would have received a numerical routing from the rate-and-route operator, such as "Mark: Other Place. Route: A ring-down. Numbers: 801 plus 073 plus 181. Operators 801 plus 073 plus." This routing would allow the Los Angeles operator to dial via the tandem switch (i.e., class-4 telephone switch) to the Mount Pleasant operator's switchboard, and have the call come in on a special trunk (designated by the 181 code) used for incoming calls to ring-down points (places with manual service whose connection to the national network was via a larger point).

Routings were important during the 1950s and 1960s, when many medium-sized and smaller cities had automatic service, but were not yet reachable by the growing numbers of people in cities with direct dialing. For example, if by the late 1950s, our fictional "Fountain Green" had upgraded its manual service with an automatic (dial-enabled four-digit number) one, an operator could often dial the call after obtaining the rate and route ("Numbers 801 plus 833 plus 4D. Operators 801 plus 073 plus."). The operator could add 833, to the local four-digit number, which in a few years, would become the seven-digit number for the residents.

Regional variations




Long-distance calling from landlines was opened to competition in the early 1990s and the use of long-distance revenue to subsidise local service was phased out a few years later. It is not possible for mobile telephone subscribers or coin-paid telephone users to select a default carrier, so long-distance calls are often priced higher from these services. The use of prepaid telephone calling cards is a possible workaround.

United Kingdom

The regulatory structure in British Telecom exchanges differs from the North American system as there are no free local calls. A long-distance call is therefore known not as a "toll call" but as a trunk call. It traditionally carried a higher rate ("national rate" instead of "local rate") and requires a trunk prefix and area code be dialled before the number. A trunk call is prefixed with '0' for national calls and '00' for international calls, following the European standard. It is now normal for local calls to cost the same as long-distance UK calls, and is now common, for a small extra monthly charge, to allow free calls to landlines within the UK. This free call allowance does not normally cover calls to the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, which whilst having UK national dialling codes, are separate telephone administrations.

International calling from the UK is deregulated in that many alternative providers allow low-cost international calling by the caller dialling an access code, usually beginning with the digit 1, followed by the full international code. These services generally use Internet-based connections in the same way as computer-based services such as Skype, Friend Caller and many others, but with the added convenience of there being no need to use a computer. It is this use of the Internet for the calls which allows such low prices. Often these same services are available from a mobile phone by the use of a special access number, though in this case there may be a charge equivalent to that of a standard landline call.

United States

The US regulatory structure splits long-distance calls into two major categories. An intrastate call is regulated under state law. Federal regulation applies to interstate calls (being interstate commerce).

In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission forced AT&T to allow MCI to connect their own long-distance lines into the Bell system.[11]

During the 1984 breakup of the Bell System, the local access and transport area or LATA concept was created to distinguish between in-region calls (which were handled by local telephone companies such as the Baby Bells) and out-of-region calls (handled by interexchange carriers such as AT&T, MCI and Sprint).

The breakup of the Bell system in 1984 came with federally imposed rules to allow the Baby Bells and other long-distance providers to compete via "equal access." Equal access allows telephone subscribers to choose an authorized telephone company or companies to handle their local toll and long-distance toll (including international) calls from traditional “POTS” (Plain Old Telephone Service) wired telephone lines.

Various feature groups were used where equal access is available to allow callers to select a long-distance carrier for each call. In feature group 'D', the current system, subscribers may dial the prefix "10" and a three-digit code identifying a long-distance carrier to handle the InterLATA call. For example, 10-288 sent a call via AT&T, 10-333 via Sprint, and 10-550 via CenturyLink. Starting in July 1998,[12] "10" needed to be used before the five-digit carrier selection. For example, 10-10-288 for AT&T.


Long-distance calls may be classified into two groups. Interstate long-distance or inter-LATA interstate long-distance, the most common group, is the one for which long-distance carriers are usually chosen by telephone customers. Another form of long-distance call, increasingly relevant to more U.S. states, is known as an inter-LATA intrastate long-distance call. This refers to a calling area outside of the customer's LATA but within the customer's state. While technically and legally long-distance, this calling area is not necessarily served by the same carrier used for "regular" long-distance, or may be provided at different rates. In some cases, customer confusion occurs as, due to rate or carrier distinctions, a local long-distance call can be billed at a higher per-minute rate than interstate long-distance calls, despite being a shorter distance.




See also


  1. ^ Eisenberg, Daniel (1989). "3. Quito to Chiriquí". Journal of Hispanic Philology. 14. pp. 1–4.
  3. ^ Crystal Fire - Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson - Google Books
  11. ^ Cantelon, Philip L. (1993). The History of MCI: 1968–1988, The Early Years. Dallas: Heritage Press. LCC HE8864.M375C36 1993. See also MCI Communications.
  12. ^ "10-10 Long Distance Phone Survey". Consumer Action. March 1, 1999. Retrieved 2020-04-01. Access codes were five digits (10-XXX) until July 1998, when the industry ran out of numbers and started to use 7 digits (10-10-XXX).