Gene Wirchenko wrote on 12/23/2017 8:08 AM:
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?

The phone company has no incentive to make this work better for users.
Their profits are regulated and they have no competition. I have a place in
a very rural area and when I first bought it computers used dial up. I got
very lucky and there was a local exchange that was not quite as local as the
others so I could reach a provider. Otherwise it would have been a non-long
distance toll call. For many others on the other side of the lake it was a
toll call. It's still that way some 30 years later. TPC has no incentive
to increase the non-toll region even though it costs them nothing in
equipment which was upgraded decades ago. They just have to change their
billing.

--

Rick C

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms,
on the centerline of totality since 1998