Phone calls made twelve miles outside of your local calling zone are considered long distance voice calls, and are charged with a specific rate per minute. The charges are based on a number of elements; calling within your local LATA (Local Access and Transport Area) is one of the variables. In general, calls made internationally are more expensive than calls made within the US.
Service providers have different long distance charges, but all of their rates are very competitive.
Intra and Interstate Calls
Long distance calls can either be intrastate and interstate. Intrastate calls are calls within the state (for instance, a call made from Hollywood to San Diego), whereas Interstate calls are calls made between states (such as a call made from Miami, Florida to Denver, Colorado).
Intra-LATA calls are made outside your local area, but are within the LATA lines the phone company has established.
Switched and Dedicated Long Distance Calls
There are two types of long distance calls: Switched and Dedicated.
Switched Long Distance is when calls are run through a local carrier, or “switched.” An ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier) owns the wires that run through a location, while client companies can use these wires on lease from the ILEC.
However, local carriers don’t own exclusive rights to the long distance lines that run from one phone company to another. IXCs (Inter eXchange Carriers) provide these. Over the last twenty years, deregulation has encouraged competitive providers other than the original (AT&T) to offer this service to customers. This means customers can select which carrier to handle their state and in-state long distance calls, along with IntraLATA calls (nearby long distance calls).
Local phone companies offer a combination of different local and long distance services at a high price.
Dedicated long distance is a dedicated point-to-point digital data service transmitting at speeds of Fractional T1 and higher. This is usually directly connected to IXCs, which, along with ILECs and re-sellers, provide a variety of options to their customers for monitoring, privacy in transmissions, and diagnostics. The signal of dedicated long distance calls is very reliable, very secure, and most of all, high quality, because the service is designed to transmit voice from end users to service providers.
Transmission speed and a fixed rate for central office termination affect the pricing of dedicated long distance services. Usually, service provides bill charges monthly.
