Long-distance calling
In telecommunications, a long-distance call or trunk call 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 and interstate calls, which are subject to different regulations. Not all interstate calls are long-distance calls. Since 1984 there has also been a distinction between intra-local access and transport area calls and those between different LATAs, whose boundaries are not necessarily state boundaries.
Before direct distance dialing, all long-distance calls were established by special switchboard 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. 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. 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 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, use these fees as a revenue source.
History
On August 10, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made a call via the telegraph line between Brantford and Paris, Ontario, eight miles distant. This test was said by many sources to be the "world's first long-distance call". This test certainly proved that the telephone could work over long distances, at least as a one-way call.Following a major flood in 1877, the president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, Arthur Pue Gorman, hired J. Frank Morrison to build a communications line. The initial plan was for a telegraph, but due to rapid advances in technology, the project was changed to a telephone system which promised lower operating costs. Morrison's construction gangs worked through the summer of 1879, completing a line that stretched over 180 miles from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland. The system used forty-eight Edison Universal Telephones stationed at intervals along the route, and was considered a pioneering achievement, the world's first commercial long distance telephone service.
In 1891, AT&T built an interconnect telephone network, which reached from New York to Chicago, the technological limit for non-amplified wiring. Users often did not use their own phone for such connections, but made an appointment to use a special long-distance telephone booth or "silence cabinet" equipped with 4-wire telephones and other advanced technology. The invention of loading coils extended the range to Denver in 1911, again reaching a technological limit. A major research venture and contest led to the development of the audion—originally invented by Lee De Forest and greatly improved by others in the years between 1907 and 1914—which provided the means for telephone signals to reach from coast to coast. Such transcontinental calling was made possible in 1914 but was not showcased until early 1915, as a promotion for the upcoming Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in the spring of the same year.
On January 25, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell ceremonially initiated the first transcontinental telephone call from 15 Dey Street in New York City, which was received by his former assistant Thomas A. Watson at 333 Grant Avenue in San Francisco. This process, nevertheless, involved five intermediary telephone operators and took 23 minutes to connect by manually patching in the route of the call.
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. The ten-digit call was connected automatically within 18 seconds.
The first subscriber trunk dialing in the United Kingdom was deployed December 5, 1958 with Elizabeth II placing a call from Bristol to Edinburgh.
International calling
After World War II, priority was given by AT&T in the US and the various PTT entities in Europe to automating switching on the toll networks in their respective countries. Thus, when TAT-1 was opened for service, it was connected to international gateway offices at White Plains, NY, and London that were already automated for domestic calls. These were designed to be able to automatically switch outward and inward international circuits as soon as common signalling standards could be negotiated. However, at the outset, to set up an international call, multiple operators were required: one to originate the call and one at each national gateway to complete a call via either ringdown to a local operator or Operator Toll Dialing.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 and London. Operator-dialed transpacific calling to Hawaii, Japan, and Australia began with the completion of the Commonwealth Pacific Cable System cable, also in 1963.
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 and London was introduced in 1970, with service extended to the whole of the US and the six largest UK cities in 1971.
Collect/reverse-charge calling
Various schemes were devised to allow large organisations to automatically accept collect calls, where the recipient pays long-distance charges for any call from a predefined area. A Zenith number in the late 1950s required an operator manually determine the destination number from a printed list; the 1967 Wide Area Telephone Service introduced the first automated toll-free telephone numbers, terminated on special fixed-rate trunks. By the 1980s, computerisation of the system allowed British Telecom "Linkline" 0800 freephone numbers and AT&T +1-800- toll-free numbers to be controlled by a database and terminated virtually anywhere with each inbound call itemised and billed individually. This smart network was further refined to provide toll-free number portability in the 1990s.Technical advances
Improvements in switching technology, the deployment of high-capacity optical fibre and an increase in competition substantially lowered long-distance rates at the end of the 20th century. Using the Internet, the distinction between local and long-distance communication is fading to the point where an Internet call from the United States to Beijing carries a lower wholesale cost than a domestic landline call to a rural independent in small-town Iowa."Calling Packages" and "Internet Phoning" were cited as a contributing factor towards "Swiftly Ending a High-Cost Category" in 2004.
Example of manual operator call
In the radio series Dragnet, Sgt. Joe Friday places an operator assisted 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.The Los Angeles long-distance operator then plugs into a direct trunk to the Salt Lake City inward operator and asks her for Mount Pleasant; the Salt Lake operator rings Mount Pleasant, where the Los Angeles operator asks for Fountain Green. The Mount Pleasant operator rings Fountain Green, and the Los Angeles operator gives the Fountain Green operator the number and name of the called party in Fountain Green. The Fountain Green operator rings the number, 14R2, a party line where a specific ringing pattern summons the second subscriber on the shared line. A man answers; the Los Angeles operator asks for the called party and states that Los Angeles is calling.
This dramatization 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 dialed directly, but a long-distance call to a distant state was a complex manual effort. The caller would dial the long-distance operator and provide the destination city name and called number as well as their own number for billing purposes as there was no automatic number identification. Before the era of Operator Toll Dialing, which began in the 1940s, an operator would first set up the route, then ring back the original caller minutes later to announce the call was ready, rather than having the caller remain on the line.
Once operator toll 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 to the Mount Pleasant operator's switchboard, and have the call come in on a special trunk used for incoming calls to ring-down points.
Routing was important even when many medium-sized and smaller cities had automatic local service, but were not yet reachable by the growing numbers of people in cities with direct dialing. For example, if by the late 1950s, Fountain Green had upgraded its manual service with an automatic system, an operator could often dial the call after obtaining the rate and route. The operator could add the three-digit office prefix to the local four-digit number, which in a few years would become the seven-digit number of the recipient.