Local Access and Transportation Area. It's a term from the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment -- the consent decree breaking up AT&T -- that represented the "exchange area" for purposes of local telephone service. The LATA is the area within which a Bell local telephone company could transport calls. Anything beyond the LATA had to be handed off to an Interexchange Carrier, or IXC. Some LATAs were very large, and as a result, even though the intraLata traffic was deemed "local" for purposes of the MFJ and could be provided by the Bell LEC, it was actually divided up into multiple exchange areas for purposes of call rating. This led to "IntraLata toll" or "short-distance" calls that the Bell could handle even though they were considered toll calls, with a per-minute charge.
Michael D. Sullivan Bethesda, MD (USA) (Replace "example.invalid" with "com" in my address.)