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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.
Toll-free numbers are also sometimes confused with 900-numbers, for which the telephone company bills the callers at rates far in excess of long-distance service rates for services such as recorded information or live chat.
A rate center is a geographical area used by a Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) to determine the boundaries for local calling, billing and assigning phone numbers. Typically a call within a rate center is local, while a call from one rate center to another is a long-distance call.)
In the meantime, the largest facilities-based CLECs, MFS, and TCG, had IPOs and then were acquired by WorldCom and AT&T, respectively, in 1996 and 1998 as those long distance companies prepared to defend their business customers from the Regional Bell Operating Companies' (RBOC) incipient entry into the long distance business.
WATS was introduced by the Bell System in 1961 as a long-distance flat-rate plan by which a business could obtain a special line with an included number of hours ('measured time' or 'full-time') of long-distance calling to a specified area. [2] [3] These lines were most often connected to private branch exchanges in large businesses.
In the United States, wireline telephone companies are divided into two large categories: long-distance (interexchange carrier, or IXCs) and local (local exchange carrier, or LECs). This structure is a result of 1984 divestiture of then-regulated monopoly carrier American Telephone & Telegraph.
Northwestel Inc. (stylized as NorthwesTel) is a Canadian telecommunications company that is the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) and long-distance carrier in the territories of Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and part of northern British Columbia and northern Alberta.
The amount of money involved in the settlement rate system is considerable. In 2003, American telephone companies made payments of three billion dollars to telephone companies and governments across the world. The settlement route arrangement is also known as the accounting rate system. The accounting rate is the sum of the two settlement rates.