LOW RATE TOLL CALLS

Evening Star, Issue 21905, 17 December 1934, Page 9

LOW RATE TOLL CALLS

v PUBLIC RESPONSE SATISFACTORY Results show that the public response to the recently instituted rate of toll calls justified the reduction. The satisfaction with which the lower rates; had been hailed by the telephone users between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., said the chief-postmaster (Mr J. Madden) this morning, had been fully borne out by results. Disregarding the • figures of smaller exchanges, and taking the returns of the twenty principal exchanges in New Zealand only, the number of calls for one week between those hours had shown an increase of 105 per cent., compared with the week prior to the introduction of the new fees. • The service was started on December I last, and the following figures give a comparison of the returns at the Dunedin exchange between mid-night and 6 a.m. prior to and after the innovation :—November 24, four calls (11s sd) ; November 25, three calls (3s lid) ; November 26, three calls (3s 7d); November 27, eight calls (16s lid); December 1, seventeen calls (£2 0s 8d); December 2, eight calls £1 2s lid); December 3, seventeen calls (£1 17s Id) ; December 4, four calls (£1 6s lid). Considering that the new service had been in operation for only a short period, and that thousands of prospective users had not yet had occasion to test its suitability as a means of communicating with distant friends, the response throughout the country had exceeded expectations. Later on as it became more widely known that the highest charge for a three-minute call made between any two places in the same island was only Is, and interisland" calls _ were _ Is 6d for the same period of time, it could he expected that the regular weekly toll talks after II p.m. would take the' place of many of the good intentions to write that so often failed to materialise, In some quarters there was a misunderstanding regarding.the charges for lengthy calls. It was to be noted that the fees quoted above referred to three minutes conversations only, an additional charge being made for each minute over the throe. It was found that the majority ,of conversations carried on were between 11 p.m. l and mid-night, and' were of a social nature. It was likely that persons in one town arranged to ring friends in another at, a given time, usually after the nightly entertainments had closed.