Long-Distance Calls

[Quinley]

When others call me it says that it is a long-distance call. Why is this?

[Anonymous]

 @BasesLoadedWalk : And older (not oldest) building intercoms where the management doesn't want to pay long distance rates.

Although really, no one's having an hour long conversation standing at the intercom. Gee, break the bank, an intercom call cost a dime (or whatever). /s

[Nezgar]

@BasesLoadedWalk 

I know from personal experience that Telus Mobility prepaid do not include long distance calling on at least half of their plans. Also, there will be those with grandfathered plans no longer offered that dont include it. I Telus Pay as You charges 50 cents per minute for long distance, so it is prudent to avoid. As long as those plans exist on any tier of Telus Mobility's network, there will be some customers who will benefit from knowing what is a long distance call that might incur extra per-minute fees, or in the case of Public Mobile, not connect at all.

Also, up until I left Rogers Wireless just over a year ago, all of their plans could be had for $5/mo less without national calling. However, Rogers *DID* do away with their long distance warning and it was especially annoying for me because I was on one of those local-only plans, and I had to be very careful to manally check if a number was local or not before calling - or pay 55 cents per minute.

Lastly, dont underestimate the swaths of customers still with land-line or home phone service, and that normally includes local calling as well. I personally prefer to use a land-line for important, work related, or long calls as the audio is not degraded by wireless voice compression, and sounds so much better.

For those reasons, I believe the long distance warning will stay on the network for the foreseeable future...

At least the calls still proceed after the warning. The workaround is simple... just prefix a 1 to your phonebook entries and move on!

[BasesLoadedWalk]

In 2021 is in-country long distance still a thing? I'm pretty sure 99.9% of people have Canada-wide calling on their plans. In-country long distance is such an outdated concept that most carriers abandoned about a decade ago. The same time period when plans had a allotment of monthly minutes and some plans had addons like unlimited incoming calls and Favorite 5 number lists.

[computergeek541]

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@Quinley wrote:

When others call me it says that it is a long-distance call. Why is this?

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The call to reach you likely is a long distance call for these callers. Whether a call is long distance depends on where they are are calling you from and the city that you phone number is assigned to (not where you are). As to if there is any extra charges for these callers to reach you, that is dependent on the plans and carriers of the people calling you.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

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@Quinley wrote:

When others call me it says that it is a long-distance call. Why is this?

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Your area code and prefix are allocated to a specific region in your province. So are your callers.

There's a possibility that your area code and/or prefix are new and that the callers systems don't have it in their database of "local" calls yet.