Gene Wirchenko wrote:
On Fri, 22 Dec 2017 15:39:08 -0600, Charles Richmond
wrote:

[snip]

Back in the bad old days, two houses on different sides of the same
freeway... a phone call from one house to the other... was a
long-distant toll call !!! That is sort of analogous to speaking
dialects !!! :-)

I always thought that that nonsense could have been solved by
using a better zone system. A call to the same zone or only one zone
away would be local; the others would be long distance. Set the zones
to allow for cities and geography.

Would this have been workable?

Do many people still pay long-distance charges? For many years we've had
plans with "free" nationwide calling. For a while when kids were in school
out of state we had a WATS line so they could fall us free. I cancelled it
later because I was getting too many calls from Puerto Rico where the
callers couldn' speak English.


--
Pete