Long Distance

Over the past few years, the price of long distance telephone service has dropped from over 10¢ per minute in the late 90's to less than 3¢ per minute today. Most of the decrease in costs has been attributed to the increase in datacenters and fiber optics lines, and the improvement in compression technology. With the huge build-up of bandwidth created in the late 90's to feed the dot com feeding frenzy, and at the same time, the mad scramble to decrease the size of files being sent over the network with better compression software, When the dot com's crashed, they left a glut of bandwidth for other services to take advantage of.

One of the industries that took advantage of the huge amount of available bandwidth, was the telecommunication industry. Since there was a ton of bandwidth, they could renegotiate their contracts for line time at a fraction of the price they had to pay when there wasn't enough space to go around. On top of that, the ability of start up phone companies like Opex-LD.com, Unitel-LD.com and Pioneer-Long-Distance.com to buy cheap line time, without having to build their own infrastructure, meant they could now cut prices to the point that it caused the big players like MCI, Global Crossing, Williams and others into bankruptcy court because of their overspending in the late 90's.

Now that residential and business customers have the choice of cheap long distance service with good customer service, there is no reason for long distance telephone customer to stay with companies like SBC, AT&T and Verizon, when they can get the same service, over the same digital networks for only a fraction of the cost. If you are interested in comparing long distance telephone prices for service in your are, comparison websites, like Calling-Plans.com and Telephone-Service.net can show you the cheapest long distance carriers in your area so that you can make an informed decision on the best long distance company for your calling needs.