The preceding 1 also ideally indicates a toll call; however, this is inconsistent across the NANP because the FCC has left it to the U.S. state public utilities commissions to regulate for traditional landlines, and it has since become moot for mobile phones and digital VoIP services that now offer nationwide calling without the extra digit.
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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.
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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.
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The definition of "local" or "long distance" calling (and the corresponding pricing) is largely a regulatory construct, by which every point outside an arbitrary group of exchange boundaries is charged at a higher "trunk call" or "toll call" rate. The charges often do not correlate directly to either straight-line distance or network topology; two exchanges 75 km apart may be local in some cases, while in other cases an adjacent pair of exchanges (or even two different exchange prefixes on the same physical switch) may arbitrarily be long-distance.
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Area code 664 in the North American Numbering Plan covers Montserrat, a tiny British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. The 664 telephone area code, standing for "MNI," was created during a split from the original 809 area code, which began permissive dialing 1 July 1996 and ended 1 June 1997. A domestic call within Montserrat is seven digits. A call from another North American Numbering Plan country (such as the United States or Canada) requires 1-664- and the seven-digit phone number, in the same format as a domestic toll call.
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Ruawai College is a secondary (years 7-13) school with a roll of students as of Ruawai District High School was established in 1929. In December 1995, Ruawai College installed a 128kbit/s DDS leased line connection that delivered internet services and offered dialup internet with IGRIN billing the service (IGRIN has since purchased by Orcon). The arrangement delivered internet to the rural community where the nearest dialup internet services were a toll call away, as well as giving the school low cost internet. At the time, only a handful of schools nationally had a campus-wide, hard wired internet service.
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These switches had some design similarities to No. 1 step-by-step systems already in use in large offices (10000 subscribers or more) but were of a simpler design (line finders would only need to scan hundreds of lines instead of the thousands in use in the cities) and not designed for expandability. Any operator assistance or toll call billing for these unattended stations was handled remotely at a larger exchange in the city. In the 1960s, Northern Electric developed the SA-1 community dial office as a small Class 5 crossbar switch for local use in rural areas.
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When AT&T; published the first configuration of proposed numbering plan areas (NPAs) for a new nationwide numbering and toll call routing system in 1947, Indiana was divided to receive two area codes. Area code 317 served the northern two- thirds of Indiana, while area code 812 served the southern third. In 1948, 317 was cut back to central Indiana, while the northern third of Indiana, including Gary, Hammond, East Chicago, South Bend, Elkhart and Fort Wayne, received area code 219. It was the first new area code after AT&T; had published the initial configuration of a nationwide numbering system in 1947.
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Automatic number identification (ANI) is a feature of a telecommunications network for automatically determining the origination telephone number on toll calls for billing purposes. Automatic number identification was originally created by AT&T; Corporation for internal long distance charging purposes,US Patent 2,265,844: Calling Line Identification CircuitUS Patent 2,300,829: Calling Line Identification System eliminating the need for telephone operators to manually request the number of the calling party for a toll call. Modern ANI has two components: information digits, which identify the class of service, and the calling party billing telephone number. ANI is not related to newer caller ID services such as call display.
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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.
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With call forwarding, there is no physical connection to the client's main telephone service, which is merely call-forwarded to the answering service (usually on a direct inward dial number) at the end of the business day. Often, a suburb of a large city is a toll call from many suburban exchanges on the opposite side of the same city, even though all of these suburbs are a local call to the city centre. A business located in such a suburb may therefore benefit from obtaining a downtown number as an "extender", to be permanently forwarded to their geographic suburban number. Where unlimited local calls are flat-rated and long-distance incurs high per- minute charges, the downtown number's wider local calling area represents a commercial advantage.
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A long-distance call is a "trunk call" in British English, but is a "toll call" in American English, though neither term is well known among younger Americans. The distinction is a result of historical differences in the way local service was billed; the Bell System traditionally flat-rated local calls in all but a few markets, subsidising local service by charging higher rates, or tolls, for intercity calls, allowing local calls to appear to be free. British Telecom (and the British Post Office before it) charged for all calls, local and long distance, so labelling one class of call as "toll" would have been meaningless. Similarly, a toll-free number in America is a freephone number in the UK. The term "freefone" is a BT trademark.
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A two-party line split between tip party and ring party could be created in such a way as to allow the central office to determine which party placed an outbound toll call by detecting that one of the ringers was disconnected when that subscriber went off-hook. This system would fail if any provision was made to allow the subscriber to turn off the bells (do not disturb) for privacy or unplug the telephone; it also presumed that each subscriber only had one telephone connected to the line. One variation of identifying the calling party on direct-dialed long-distance calls is a party code, usually a single digit inside a circle displayed on the phone's number tag. The dialing sequence for such calls is "1" (access number for DDD), the party code, the area code, and the desired number (1 + party code + area code + number).
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