[cpach]

Interesting!

I guess it helped that phone calls were quite expensive, so people generally made very short calls. I haven’t really thought about this before but one of the main reasons for the pricing system could have been the facts that you mentioned.

In Sweden, the pricing system was tiered. Same area code (roughly: same municipality) = lowest rate. Neighbouring area codes = higher rate. Outside of that = highest rate. The rate was halved after 6pm. A reason for lowering the rates in the evening might have been that there were far less business users calling after 6pm.

One of the reasons I remember the pricing system is that my parents would not be happy if I dialed in to a modem pool before 6pm :)

Before I was born, the telephone company in Sweden (Televerket, later Telia) started to upgrade their system to use digital telephone exchanges (AXE). But there were of course still some kind of hard limit for how many concurrent calls they could handle, so I guess that’s why they kept the pricing system for a while.

This is partly speculation on my part, so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

[solid_fuel]

Yep, that's right. The long distance trunks were a more limited resource so the telcos charged more per minute to use them. After digital exchanges came around it was less of a factor, but I think the pricing structure stuck around for a while.