The tyranny of distance !

For the past three score years distance has been the criteria in charging for phone calls. That is fast changing.

Older folk will remember the days when making any sort of phone call involved a receptionist asking " Number please " - and a wait while a plug was inserted to make the connection.

Local phone calls were cheap - but people blanched when that dreaded term " a trunk line call " became involved. Such calls were connected in three minute segments and users dreaded the question " Do you wish to extend " because of the high cost involved.

Making a " trunk call " for most people was restricted to special events such as a birthday greeting - or in many cases - to advise of a death.

Then came that magnificent invention - the rotary dial and with it the improvement of subscriber connection for local calls. Years later technology advanced this concept to subscriber trunk dialling ( STD ) for distance calls - and eventually to call to other parts of the world - but distance remained the criteria for charging those calls.

It finally dawned on the telephone companies that there was no actual cost involved in a telephone call. The expensive equipment and it's servicing had to be kept up to date whether the traffic was a single call - or millions.

We now are seeing a re-think - with the mobile companies starting to offer unlimited local, trunk and even overseas calls for no charge - provided you pay a fee to connect to their net.

The new source of revenue is coming from the Internet. The phone companies are tapping their customers for a small monthly charge to connect to the world wide web which enables them to send and receive emails - and all the wonderful services that a computer provides - on their new generation mobile phones.

It seems that technology has at last conquered the tyranny of distance !