Talk:Long distance

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Is there any service that helps a telephone user determine whether a call between two numbers will be long distance?

Also, there is an odd billing custom in the US: local-long-distance.

[edit] local long-distance

The section "Categories and charges" mentions local long-distance in the second and third paragraphs. Are we repeating the same concept here, or using one term to describe two different ones?

Replaced external links who contributed the original content for this article.

Please quit removing links from this section. The references are external sources and copywrited. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.24.76.41 (talk • contribs) .

This user has been blocked from editing as a repeat spammer. Gwernol 11:18, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Long distance carriers

I'm waiting for the day when the concept of long distance goes away--with advanced digital codecs, bandwidth can be reduced, and with IP technology, geography really means a lot less than it used to. But I digress.

While attempting to reduce my grandfather's phone bill as much as possible (as he uses his cell for everything except fax calls and the occasional incoming call), I asked the SBC/AT&T representative if we could just not have a long distance plan (as the cheapest offered was still $2 per month for the 10-cent-per-minute OneRate plan). She said that it was possible, but you have to be extremely careful about not making long distance calls, as it can get very expensive. She said that if you don't have a long distance plan, the exchange randomly picks a long distance carrier--or, in her words, the LD carriers grab whichever out-of-plan calls they want and proceed to charge the maximum allowable rate, which is $5 per minute.

This is just the word of one AT&T CSR, so I didn't want to incorporate it into the article yet. Anyone able to confirm this or want to add it in? cluth 06:34, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

[[The insertion of Big Red Wire by Brad the owner is a joke. They have 8 employee's and less than 50,000 customers nationwide. They resell the Qwest network and are not a facility based carrier. He is simply spamming.Iclimb (talk) 04:38, 8 May 2008 (UTC)]]

[edit] Cultural Bias: This Article is completely biased towards the United States

Outside of the US, for example, the United Kingdom, the concept of long-distance calls, the language describing long-distance calls, and the technology implementing long-distance calls, does not exist. In the United Kindgom, for example, you can dial a call anywhere in the UK, or anywhere in the world, for a flat rate decided by your local telephone operator and, no matter how many telephone companies the call may have to pass through, you only ever get a single bill.

The globalise tag was added to warn people, particularly non-native English speakers, of the dangers of misinterpretation with regard to world culture when reading this article.