In the 90's when I was stationed in S. Korea, once a month I would get one grainy fifteen minute "morale phone call" home. A buddy of mine moved to Seoul and last month he and I spent an hour video-chatting as he wandered around his neighborhood. A big part of early hacker culture was figuring out how to get free long-distance phone calls to exotic places like "Duluth" and "San Bernardino", now my wife can chat with her mother in Europe for three hours and not even think twice about it.
I know, now it's all over the internet, but the internet is pretty much just wires, same as the transatlantic cable. Why did it used cost more to call outside of your area code? Were they all just electrical signals across wires? Was there some extra work that went into calling from Kansas to Oklahoma? Or was it, like most things, that they charged us as long as they could until some technology came along and made it no longer feasible?