Intralata refers to calls that terminate outside the local calling area but within your local access and transport area (LATA). Unfortunately, most people don’t know the boundaries of either their local calling area or their LATA. If they did know, they could manage their intralata calls and charges much better.
It used to be that if you leased an access line from the LEC, they automati- cally became your toll-call carrier. Today, customers can choose what carrier they want for calls made outside the local calling area. If you don’t select an intralata carrier when you begin the lease of your local access line, though, you automatically inherit the LEC as your intralata carrier.
Say you’re in Pittsburgh and are calling your son, who is at school at Penn State University’s local satellite campus eleven miles away. Such a call crosses local calling areas within the Pittsburgh LATA, making it a call in the intralata service category.
First the call goes into your carrier’s nearest switching facility. Based on the area code and prefix of the number you dialed, the call gets routed over the PSTN to the carrier’s destination switching facility. From there, the call is sent over the PSTN to the facility and switch that terminates your son’s line. Then the call goes to your son’s line and the actual telephone attached to his line
in his dorm room. The telephone rings, and when your son answers the phone, a session is established for the call’s duration. As a consumer, you pay a hefty per-minute charge for this type of intralata call.
Intralata calling for consumers is expensive in comparison to local calling rates. Also, consumers have little choice in intralata calling plans. It’s always a per-minute rate that can change as the distance between endpoints involved in the call increases or the availability of carrier facilities increases outside the local calling area. If you or your company plan to stay on POTS- PSTN telephony, ask your carrier to give you (in writing) the boundaries for each of the five regulated service categories.
For example, the call to my son is a higher rate than the call to my doctor in a suburb of Pittsburgh, even though this suburb is farther away. Why? The call to my son must travel over rural areas where the carrier has less up-to-date facilities and must use more expensive, slower, alternate routes.
But both calls would usually be less than a call to Philadelphia, which is still in the state of Pennsylvania but farther away from my local calling area than either my doctor or my son’s campus near Pittsburgh. The cost of a POTS call usually increases for the consumer based on the distance of the call — out- side the LATA. For a business using POTS, it may increase, be a flat rate, or be free, depending on what type of service level agreement exists between the business and the carrier.
Intralata calls are carried the same way for consumers and businesses, but businesses can negotiate intralata rates with their regional (that is, intralata) toll carrier. (Consumers can merely select a carrier and live with the per- minute rate they are assigned.) The carrier can offer businesses a bundled deal based on the anticipated yearly volume of minutes and the amount of minutes the company is willing to commit to.
Carriers can offer business customers flat nonrecurring rates. For example, they can offer a flat rate per call with no recurring minute charges. In this way, the carrier is selling intrastate carrier services like the LEC sells local carrier services. Sometimes you can fashion a long-term deal based on the monthly volume of call minutes. Because carriers are eager to get longer- term contracts, they make those deals look very attractive. But don’t bemisled: Rates and call volumes change over time. If you’re locked into a long- term deal, it may not look like such a deal after several rate hikes.
If your company fails to reach the projected volume it commits to in a monthly, yearly, or even longer-term deal, you’ll usually incur penalties. Make sure you check the fine print on any agreement.
How can VoIP help you with intralata charges? It varies depending on whether you are a consumer or a business. If you are a consumer, you would enter into an agreement with a VoIP carrier. You would pay a flat charge per month to call anywhere outside your local calling area.
If you are a company with multiple locations in and around one or more LATAs and your locations are connected with a VoIP network, all the calling that goes on between these various locations is free of recurring carrier service charges. When one location needs to call someone off-net at a distant location, the call can be carried on-net as far as possible before it goes off-net.
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