THE long standing frustration of, 150,000 telephone users who had to pay long distance rates to call nearby towns will end today when Telecom reorganises its charge areas.
The anomaly whereby, for example, it was cheaper to telephone Tralee from Belfast than from Killarney, will end. Telecom Eireann subscribers in Killarney will now be able to ring their neighbours in Tralee for 11p for a three minute call. It used to cost 28p, with a call from Belfast costing 23p.
The same situation arose in other areas, where people in neighbouring towns had to pay trunk call rates to speak to each other. The anomaly arose because when the Telecom billing system was set up in the 1950s, charge areas were based on the engineering centre to which subscribers" were connected.
The charges were determined by engineering criteria rather than on the distance between towns. Thus calls between towns as close as Monaghan and Cootehill, or Ardee and Navan or Kells, were billed as trunk calls.
The anomaly was particularly obvious when the costs of calls between neighbouring towns were compared with cheaper calls to the same towns from Northern Ireland. British Telecom sees the island of Ireland as one unit for billing and when it reduced its charges in the North, the cost of a call from Belfast fell to below that between many neighbouring towns in the South.
In Killarney, the Telephone Equity Campaign, a group led by a local accountant, Mr Kevin Moynihan, waged a four year campaign to end the anomaly, getting the support of politicians, including the Tanaiste, Mr Spring.
Yesterday Mr Moynihan praised Telecom Eireann's corporate affairs spokesman, Mr Gerry O'Sullivan, for his help in arranging "constructive discussions" which ended with the decision to reorganise the billing.
Fifteen other areas will benefit from the changes, affecting some 150,000 subscribers. These include callers between Bandon and Cork city. Portlaoise and Castlecomer, Monaghan and Cootehill, and Mullingar and Clara.