Long distance
A long distance call is a telephone call between two telephone subscribers in the fixed network who do not belong to the same local network . When dialing the telephone number , the caller therefore usually prefixes the telephone code . The call is established in the self-dial service or through a toll switch .
The counterpart to long-distance calls is a local call , which is made within the same local network. The long-distance call can be made nationally and internationally.
history
Long distance calls existed at the beginning of the history of telephony . The photo opposite of Alexander Graham Bell , inventor of the telephone , attests to his participation in the first telephone connection between the American cities of New York and Chicago in 1892.
In the 1970s, long-distance calls comprised calls within the Federal Republic of Germany (including West Berlin) that were conducted outside the local network, as well as within the GDR (including East Berlin), as well as connections from both German states abroad and from a German state in the other. From the FRG there was direct dialing to other countries at least with the Benelux countries, France, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark and a few other countries. In addition, East Berlin was the only GDR local network that could be dialed directly from the FRG in the 1970s ( area code: 00 37 2 ). If no self-selection was possible, long-distance calls between the two German states or between the two German states abroad had to be registered with the long-distance exchange and made manually from there. A minimum fee of three minutes of speaking time was charged for this. However, as soon as the self-dialing remote service was introduced, the telephone subscriber had to use it and could therefore benefit from fee reductions at certain times of the day (especially at night). The phone number was to be preceded by a zero as a traffic elimination number and the actual area code according to the official directory of area codes , an enclosure to the official telephone book .
In 1967, 304 long-distance calls were made from the Netherlands per telephone station. From Denmark there were 277, from the Federal Republic of Germany 219, followed by Sweden (170), the German Democratic Republic (166) and France (144 conversations). At the same time there were only 54 calls from the USA, 42 from Canada and 39 from Argentina. The proportion of self-chosen calls grew continuously in the FRG from a proportion of 9.8 percent in 1950, 47 percent in 1955 to 78.9 percent in 1960. Since 1965 it has been around 95 percent; since then self-choice has been the rule.
Until the introduction of flat rates in voice telephony, long-distance calls were usually more expensive than local calls of the same length.
literature
- D. Breidt, entry "Long-distance conversation", in: Heinrich Gerwig, Hans Griem, Karl Herz, Otto Kirchner, Kurt Knebel, Walter Koropp (editor): Concise dictionary of electrical telecommunications , on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Post and Telecommunications, 2. Edition, Bonn, 1970, Volume 1, A – F, pp. 423–424.
Web links
- Long distance call - in the dictionary