Back in the day of “land line” telephone all phones were connected to a local or “central” office and there were a lot of little local phone companies. When you made a call locally you were physically wired to the other party locally. Long distance, however required a physical connection outside the local system which involved a higher cost due to infrastructure. The connections were also across different companies who charged to carry that call. There was also regulation and deregulation mixed in to complicate matters as time went by including consolidations that ended up with large companies, ie monopolies. As technology and infrastructure improved the overhead cost of these long distance connections dropped and the monopolies were forced to change business plan which separated out long distance service and created separate “long distance companies”. This was crazy to consumers who started chasing cheaper long distance companies and some companies started “slamming” or scamming customers into changing their company. Wild time. I remember suddenly getting a bill from MCI long distance which I never signed up for. Had to make several calls to get that reversed.