On Sat 30/01/2021 15:00, Mike Humphrey wrote:
On Fri, 29 Jan 2021 21:00:34 +0000, Russell Hafter News wrote:
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.

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.


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!!