Telecom For Dummies

The phone calls you make fall into six categories:

• Local

• Local toll or intraLATA

• Intrastate

• Interstate

• Outlying area

• International

There is some uniformity to how the calls are grouped, but the individual carriers have their own ways to determine what they charge for calls within each category.

Making a local call

Any call that terminates less than 13 miles from where it originates is generally considered a local call. These are calls that your local carrier completes and, for residences, you may never see them individually listed on your phone bill. The front part of your telephone directory lists area codes and prefixes (your area code and the first three digits of a phone number) in your local calling area. If you call any phone number with the area code and first three digits of the phone number listed, you can rest assured you are dialing a local number.

 Tip  Intrastate calls are local, toll, and long-distance calls that occur within the same state. Interstate calls are local, toll, and long-distance calls that occur between two states.

The prefix intra stands for within, and the prefix inter stands for between. If you have a difficult time remembering what is inter and what is intra, just think of the Internet. You can hop on the Internet and go to a Web site in South Africa, Japan, or anywhere else in the world, because the Internet crosses all borders. With that in mind, any call that crosses a border is an interstate or interLATA call, and any call that remains within the borders is an intrastate or intraLATA call.

Your local calling area is determined by your local carrier, and only covers an area within a 13-mile radius of you. This area doesn’t include your entire LATA, which is how you get to make intraLATA calls.

 Remember  Local calls for businesses are generally not free. The rate your business is being charged may be a penny per minute or less, but that little pittance adds up over time. Unless you’re using residential lines for your business, expect to be charged for every call you make, even if you’re just calling down the street to order pizza.

Introducing the LERG database

In case you are wondering how the local carrier can determine whether you’re calling 13 miles or more away in about 100 milliseconds, I have a logical answer for you. The Local Exchange Routing Guide, or LERG, is a nationally updated database that receives information from and sends information to every local carrier in the U.S.

The LERG database takes the area code, along with the first three digits of every phone number and geographically links this data to the phone number’s local carrier. (The combination of the area code and first three digits of the phone number is referred to as an NPA-NXX.)

The LERG database links this data to the physical location of the office that supplies service for that NPA-NXX. Whenever you make a phone call, your local carrier identifies the number you are dialing, checks its copy of the LERG database, and routes your call accordingly.

If you want a small look at a section of the LERG, see Table 3-1. As you can see in the table, every NPA-NXX is identified by city, state, and LATA. Each NPA-NXX is also identified by vertical and horizontal positions that act like GPS coordinates. The vertical and horizontal information is used by carriers to determine the distance between phone numbers. This is how your local carrier knows whether someone you are dialing is within the 13-mile radius for a local call, or whether you’re placing an intraLATA call.

Making local toll calls

Calls that you make to locations more than 13 miles away, but which are still within your LATA are called local toll calls or intraLATA calls. For years, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these were some of the most expensive calls you could make. The local carriers were being forced to allow competition into their markets and they held on to this section of telephone traffic the longest.

Most local carriers rated local toll calls by increasing the cost of a call depending on the geographic distance between the origination and termination point, so a call that only traveled 10 miles was cheaper than one that crossed 200 miles. Okay, that makes sense. But that local toll call to a termination point 200 miles away cost a whole lot more than the local toll call to the next town over. How much is a whole lot more? Well, let me put it this way: You could call London, U.K., for less than it cost you to call to the farthest reaches of your LATA. In the mid-1990s, all local carriers finally allowed the option of having long-distance carriers automatically complete local toll calls. They generally have better rates than you would receive from your local carrier in this area, unless you are on some special promotional rate plan.

Making an intrastate call

An intrastate call terminates within the same state it originates, but it may not terminate within the same LATA. If you call from Dallas, Texas, to Houston, Texas, for example, you cross out of LATA 552 without calling outside the state of Texas.

 Tip  The instant a call leaves a LATA, the call becomes a long-distance call — even if that call begins and ends within the same state. In the eyes and ears of the telecommunications industry, LATA borders are of greater significance than state borders.

In an industry that has an acronym for everything, you may not be surprised to discover that telecom community has even renamed your phone number. Your number is not just your number, or even your phone number, but an ANI (pronounced either Annie or ay-enn-eye).

ANI stands for Automatic Number Identification, and represents the entire ten digits of your phone number. You can use the term ANI rather than the phone number in any conversation with a representative at your carrier and the rep will automatically understand that you mean phone number.

If you want, the next time you chat with someone at the phone company, just throw in the term ANI so that the customer service agent knows you did your research and aren’t someone to be trifled with.

 Remember  Some long-distance carriers only have two general categories for pricing calls, intrastate and interstate. If this is the case with your carrier, your intraLATA, local toll, and intrastate calls are all charged at the same per-minute rate. The difference between intrastate long-distance costs from state to state is amazing. States like California may have an average intrastate rate of 5 cents per minute, but if you want to call from Miami, Florida, to Tallahassee, Florida, you can expect to pay about 15 cents per minute.

Making an interstate call

Any call that originates in one state and terminates in another is an interstate call. In general, the cost for interstate calling is less than the cost of intrastate calling.

If your main customer base is located in the same state your company is located, you may be better off financially if you relocate your office to another state! Making interstate calls can easily reduce your bill by up to 50 percent (and perhaps even more) of what you currently pay in intrastate charges.

Dealing with calls to outlying areas

Most long-distance companies in the U.S. have a gray area in their rates when it comes to interstate calls to Alaska and Hawaii. These states are frequently not included in domestic pricing, even though they are part of the domestic U.S. Along with Alaska and Hawaii, other U.S. principalities like the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and Puerto Rico are generally also put into this nebulous category, although they are technically international areas. Because none of these areas is directly attached to the lower 48 U.S. states, special carriers have to be contracted to transport the calls over the Pacific ocean, the Caribbean Sea, or through Canada. The markets in these areas are not large enough to bring in competition to drive the costs down, so the carriers that service these areas have to pay a little more overhead.

 Remember  If you do business in any of the outlying areas, you should call your long-distance carrier and confirm your rates for calls both to and from these areas. Your outbound rate to call someone in Hilo, Hawaii, may not be that expensive, but the cost for someone there to call your toll-free number could cost your business twice as much. It is well worth making the call to prevent being hit with hundreds of dollars more in charges than you were expecting.

Making bona fide international calls

International calls are, technically, any call that terminates in a country other than the U.S. That being said, international calls come in two flavors, those that you have to start with 011, and those that you dial just like they were in the U.S.

Many countries can be reached by simply dialing 1+ area code + phone number. Countries like Canada, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, St. Kitts, and many of the Caribbean nations are in the North American dialing plan. You can call individuals and businesses in these countries just as you call the rest of the U.S.

 Remember  Of course, the rates are different than if you were calling domestically, but at least you don’t need to dial 011.

Countries that are not in the North American dialing plan require you to dial: 011 + Country Code + City Code (if applicable) + phone number. There is unfortunately no international standard for phone numbers. They could have a one-, two-, or three-digit country code, and possibly a one-, two-, or three-digit city code, before you get to the local phone number. Even the length of local phone numbers varies; they have six to eight digits. For example, call someone in the Seychelles Islands (located in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Africa, in case you’re not a geography whiz), you have to dial 011-248-XX-XXXX; to call London, U.K., you have to dial three more digits, even though the U.K. has a shorter country code and only a two-digit city code.

 Tip  You can find a comprehensive list of all the country codes in the world at www.countrycallingcodes.com or look in the front of your local telephone directory.

The cost to call international destinations varies based on the following factors:

• Which country you’re calling: The greater the price charged by the government or local carriers to terminate calls in a particular country, the more likely you will be to pay a king’s ransom. If the foreign government decides it is a great source of revenue to pull money from these calls, you can expect excessive rates.

• The geographic area within the country: If you call a remote area in any country, you are going to pay more. As a basic rule, competition drives down the cost of international long-distance calls. For example, it’s cheaper on some networks to call Manila, Philippines, than any other area in that country, because Manila, the capital city, is the most densely populated area of the country.

• Whether you’re calling a cellphone or special service number: A special service number is a telephone number used for an entertainment purpose (see the sidebar, elsewhere in this chapter, “The secret’s in the special service”). The reason these numbers cost a pretty penny is because companies built them specifically so they could inflate the cost as their source or revenue.

   Tip  International price lists from long-distance carriers offer different rates based on these factors. For example, you may pay one rate to call the country in general, a different rate for calling a cellphone within the country, and still another rate if you call someone who lives in one of the major cities in the country.

Dialing internationally for the first time

Placing an international call based on what’s printed on someone’s business card isn’t always the easiest thing in the world — especially if you don’t do it every day. Companies print up business cards for domestic or regional use. If you travel to Europe for business and pick up someone’s card, you may notice that European city codes look something like (071) or (045). You must dial 0 and then 71 before you dial the phone number. The actual city code may be 71 or 45, but in Europe the numeral 0 acts like 1 in the U.S., which you must enter before dialing an area code.

If you’re calling a business associate in London and his or her business card says (071), you drop the 0 in front of the city code and dial 011 + 44 + 71 + phone number. But if you called that same individual from a phone in London, you’d dial 071 + phone number.