TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: NYC Phone Rates, was: Sid Ceasar and Phones in Comedy

NYC Phone Rates, was: Sid Ceasar and Phones in Comedy

Danny Burstein (dannyb@panix.com)
Fri, 9 Sep 2005 18:50:40 UTC

In <telecom24.411.18@telecom-digest.org> Wesrock@aol.com writes:

> Has anything but measured service every been available in New York,
> where the Honeymooners was set?

In the 1950s through the early 1960s, residential consumers in NYC
were offered two plans:

a) a true flat rate service, but this only
applied to calls in your very local neighborhood.

So if you were calling the drugstore 1/2
mile away you were probably in the zone, but
calling the movie theater three miles down
the blvd to get its schedule cost you
per minute.

b) An untimed, but charged per call, rate,
that covered a reasonably decent area.

When this was first set up (at least
in the early 1960s, can't say for earlier)
you had an allowance of 75 "message units"
in your base charge. Above those 75 calls
you paid an additional 5 cents or so, untimed.

Note that the untimed message unit did NOT
give you the entire five boroughs, It let you
call your own borough and, depending on
your location, about half the rest of the
city and some suburban areas. For most
people and most calls (certainly not all)
that was close enough.

Bit by bit the 75 message unit allowace got cut down, so nowadays
there's nothing there there. On the slight plus side back in the 1970s the
"local area" for untimed calls expanded to the entire city.

(Nowadays a bunch of very confusing options are available through
Verizon and the various CLECS, cablecos, and other folk). --

Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dannyb@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]

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