Frontier, well Citizen's, they are the ones who taught me the money grubbing concept of local long distance calling.
I’m not that far away from Rochester, NY, one of Frontier’s home markets. However, Verizon (NYNEX -> Bell Atlantic) is the ILEC where I live, Frontier takes over at the county border less than a mile way. Calling my neighbors on the other side of the county line was a local long distance call. Being in a rural area, my school district covered portions of six towns split between three different counties, your friends were determined by the county you lived in. Its sounds weird to say this as it was only the 1990s, but since phone was the main way to communicate, I missed out on some friendships because of not being able to communicate after school with others in my class and I was not the only one. If there was a project and partners were assigned and I was paired up with someone in a different county, our parents would drop off us at a central spot, like the library, since it was just too expensive to work on stuff over the phone. There was an occasion or two were I called people who were 5 miles or less away using prepaid long distance cards of used one of those 10-10 services.
It didn’t do me any good, since I was well out of school by then, but once Time Warner Cable came out with their phone service, and offered unlimited calling with nationwide long distance for $30, everyone in this tri-county area dropped Verizon and Frontier in a heartbeat. It almost seemed like people were more excited to be able to affordably talk to their neighbors down the road then their relatives 3 states over.
I still remember the guy that would till my moms vegetable garden was in Citizens land and either didn't have a long distance carrier, or had LD calling blocked. Once he found out we had internet access, he would email us the day before he wanted to order a pizza or sub from the local pizzeria on our side or the border, and we would phone the order in for him so he didn't have to wait.
