Long-distance calling

Telephone call charged at a higher rate In telecommunications, a long-distance call (U.S.) or trunk call (also known as a toll call in the UK [citation needed]) is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are typically charged a higher billing rate than local calls. The term is not necessarily synonymous with placing calls to another telephone area code. Long-distance calls are classified into two categories: national or domestic calls which connect two points within the same country, and international calls which connect two points in different countries. Within the United States there is a further division into long-distance calls within a single state (intrastate) and interstate calls, which are subject to different regulations (counter-intuitively, calls within states are usually more expensive than interstate calls). Not all interstate calls are long-distance calls. Since 1984 there has also been a distinction between intra-local access and transport area (LATA) calls and those between different LATAs, whose boundaries are not necessarily state boundaries. Before direct distance dialing (DDD), all long-distance calls were es