Someone on the railroad newsgroup said Enterprise numbers are still in use. (Enterprise numbers were manually reached through the operator and served as toll-free lines prior to 800 direct dialed service. The operator had a table in which she converted the Enterprise number to an actual telephone number and placed the call, billing the recipient.)
I don't think he's correct.
He said:
And he is wrong in saying they were 'different'. They were the same thing, regards restrictions on calling areas, etc. In the earliest days of '800 service', out of the 600-plus possible 'prefixes' possible in any area code (using the exclusion of '0' or '1' as the first digit rule) those three digit code prefixes were assigned to every type of restriction possible: Bands one through six for each state; band eight (intrastate) for your state only' your community only, etc. Band one was always the states immediatly adjacent to your state, _but not including your own (intrastate) calls_; band two was the next 'ring' of states beyond the band one area; the bands got a bit larger as they expanded outward. Essentially the types of 'In-WATS' service were the same as the outward WATS bands. Hawaii and Alaska were not included in WATS; they were coin-rated calls. Sometime in the middle 1970's the band six areas (relative to wherever you were located) were combined with band five points and Alaska/Hawaii were made band six to everyone in the continental USA. The three digit prefix in your 800 number said what was or was not included, i.e. "the number you have dialed is not included in your calling plan" was the intercept message given to people who tried to dial 800-621-xxxx who were not in Illinois, for example, since 800-621 was assigned to in-WATS subscribers in Illinois who had requested Band 8 (Illinois intrastate only) service.
On in-WATS (as opposed to out-WATS service) calls were always translated to some 'regular' seven-digit number. For instance at Amoco, in-WATS calls (I forget which band) were actually translated into WELlington-5-1389 if memory serves me. Out-WATS on the other hand went out and were billed to '146-0000' or something equally non-dialable, i.e a 'dedicated line'; they had to be on separate instruments or at least separate lines. Now today, in 2005, we would say, like Shakespeare, "Much Ado About Nothing". The costs for long distance calls have gone down to about nothing anyway, although back then, if you bought long distance service in bulk, by the hour, it was also less expensive than 'regular' service. But there became a time at which it was just totally impractical to keep trying to save money by the way you divided up pennies.
You may _possibly_ be able to purchase 'banded' WATS service, either in or out-bound from telco; I just have not kept up on it. I know most telecom companies do not supply banded service any longer (when I was at Amoco in Chicago, quite literally if I had used a 'Band 1' line and dialed 213-anything, the call would have gotten intercepted with a 'not in your calling area' recording, just as people in the 213 area who tried to dial 800-621 anything. Somewhere in our archives there is a chart telling the description of each 800 prefix as to what state it was in, and the limits or range of its incoming calls. I strongly suspect your railroad newsgroup person, unless he was around prior to divestiture (hardly anyone is, these days) would recall 'banded' WATS service. But obviously he remembers all about Enterprise service, which _you_ don't. They were designed to do the _same thing_, only with manual service instead of automated service; that is, place an 'automatically accepted' collect call, no need for an operator to get a verbal okay on accepting the charges. Lisa, would you do me a favor please and post this in your railroad newsgroup as a response for me? Thanks.
Oh, by the way, there was a Band Seven also, although rarely used. While one through six were increasing larger geographic areas of the USA (or in the case of Canadian WATS service in Canada) and band eight was always intrastate _your state only_, band seven, as obscure as it was, was _your community only_. If you only wanted to accept collect calls automatically from the Chicago area and _you were in Chicago_ that was treated as band seven. In Enterprise service days, Rate and Route (815+161 when the operator dialed it to inquire what to do) would advise 'in the Chicago exchange only, dial 312-xxx-xxxx'. And where the operators had a 'flip chart' at their fingertips with the most common Enterprise number translations, such as airlines, credit card companies, etc, for more obscure or less well-known Enterprise numbers the operator had to call Rate and Route (in Morris, Illinois 815+161) to get advice. Eventually, band seven was replaced in most places with special prefixes in a regular area code doing the same thing. In other words, anyone in Chicago 312 could dial (I think it was)
312-920-xxxx to get the desired 'auto-collect' place they were calling. In Kansas, until a couple years ago, 620-870 got you a 'free' call to the Cingular Wireless switch here in Independence, then one day Cingular Wireless told customers they would have to pay to stay on that switch since 'we discontinued the special deal we had with Southwestern Bell'. Anyway Lisa, tell your newsgroup person about this won't you please? Thanks. PAT]