Discount Long Distance

Remember all those 10-10 long distance companies? You don't? Well, back in the late 90s there were many companies like 10-10-320 that ran television commercials for their discount long distance services. AT&T fought back...with Carrot Top.

These 10-10 numbers allowed a caller to dial ( often from pay phones, remember those?) the number and then pay only 10 cents per minute for long distance calls. I remember names like the "dime line" and these companies places ads and cards everywhere. Back then AT&T and MCI charged outrageous rates like 20-30 cents a minute to call someone across the state.

The "problem" with these dime a minute services was that eventually someone would come out with the 5 cent call, then the 4 cent, and 3 cent. Big companies lowered their rates to 7 cents per minute. And other competing services took over ( VOIP, wireless,etc). This was before EVERYONE had a cell phone. A lot of young adults had pagers. When they received a page they would call the number back from home or a pay phone.

Around 2000 many long distance companies came to be- offering 3-4 cpm without dialing a code every time you made a call. For a few years it was very easy to get someone to replace their AT&T plan with a <5 cents plan with no monthly fees.

While the heyday of this service is long gone ( people have cell phones, VOIP, Instant messaging, text, facebook now), there are still quite a few discount long distance companies with very good rates of 2-3 cents per minute on long distance calls.