UK TOLL charge??

[Andy Burns]

Look at the first two rows ...

[Andy Burns]

fairly obviously a "home line" not a "business line", though you can have a business line at home.

[tim...]

in that case then what you have said is not correct

residential customers are charged National rate for all calls 24/7

[tim...]

that appears to be an unachievable tariff

see my reply to you other post or

page 27

[Andy Burns]

I see asterisks and triangles for footnotes, plus the PDF linked from there says

"Local BT divides the country into a large number of distinct geographical areas. When you make a call to a ?geographical? number within the same area as your own line, or to a number within an area adjacent to your own area you will be charged at ?Local? rate. You can find out which numbers you can call at Local rate in the BT Phonebook for your location."

[Scott]

Dare I mention toll calls vs trunk calls :-)

[Andy Burns]

As I said earlier, that was what I initially thought too

Well, that was always taken as *the* definitive BT price list

x-post to uk.telecom added, to gather other opinions ...

[Russell Hafter News]

[Snip]

I am on Caller Plus tarif from the Phone Coop and I still get local call rates. They also apply local rates rather than national rates to 03xx numbers.

Local rate: Day 2.55 Night 1.02 Weekend 1.02 National rate: Day 3.06 Night 2.52 Weekend 1.51

It is a legacy tarif; been on it for 15 years? Several other legacy tarifsalso have a lower charge for local calls than for national ones.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I am on a payg (IDNET) for landline. £10.50 a month rental, 1p a minute to any other uk landline.

Been on it a couple of years.

[Mike Humphrey]

I think that's the answer - the concept of local calls still exists as there are still people on legacy tariffs (and possibly the very rare current one) that makes the distinction. However the vast majority of current tariffs do not make any distinction between them.

With the way the modern network is set up, as a technical concept it doesn't make a lot of sense. There's no guarantee that a "local" call will travel a shorter path or use less equipment than a "long distance" call - especially if it's on another provider's network, when the call may cross the country to a gateway between the networks and back. With VoIP numbers, there's no guarantee that the "local" number is even in the area that the code belongs to.

Mike

[Woody]

With VoIP there's no guarantee that the call routing is even with the originating country!!

For interest, many years ago I was part of a contractors team that maintained the AA radio network. They had a control centre in Leeds and a radio node on a hilltop about 15m E of York. One night a colleague got a callout that the private wire between Leeds and the radio site had failed, apparently. He attended, confirmed same and rang BT. They came back after a minute or so and said yes, indeed it had failed between Leicester and Peterborough. Eh? Seems that the line route was from NE Leeds direct to Bradford exchange (note, not Leeds!), from there back to Leeds, to Leicester, to Peterborough, to Lincoln, to York, to Pocklington, to the serving exchange at Bishop Wilton and then to the site. What should have been a

38 mile route from Leeds direct to York and then following the above, was actually almost 260 miles!!

[Chris Green]

Not to mention that VOIP providers will give you a number from any area code, and for that matter you can often keep your old number when you move house.

So my 'area code' 01473 doesn't necessarily indicate that another number with the same code is in the same area. Would one that isn't in the same area be charged as local or not?