There still are some astronomical charges in the telecommunications industry. When you look at the price of data roaming when you go out side your free-to-roam areas i.e. in the US or in the EU for me, the costs suddenly go from so cheap you don't need to think give it a second thought  to ... "you might need to remortgage the house if you accidentally open Spotify!"

It was very new technology back then and capacity on those long routes was extremely limited, and they knew how to charge for them.

It's not all that long ago when you'd really think before making international calls, whereas now you wouldn't bat an eyelid in most cases or can just use FaceTime, Skype, WhatsApp, Signal .. and umpteen other over the top free VoIP services that provide way better audio than a phone and video, can send photos, files etc etc.

It's amazing though when you look at how fast the technology is moving though. While VoIP may have been around for a long time at this stage, it's come of age and turned telephony into an app on IP networks and nothing more. What were telephone exchanges / central offices are living on as aggregation nodes housing routers and switches for fibre networks carrying internet data.

I think though we also sometimes forget just how old switched voice technology is. TDM switches have been with us since the late 1970s and early 80s. Many of them are 40 years old (with upgrades). In some cases probably far older than the crossbars they replaced.

I know in the network here in Ireland, a lot of the Ericsson ARF and ITT Pentaconta crossbars dated from the 1960s and 70s and were out of service by the 1990s so maybe 25-30 years old. Some of the digital exchanges that replaced them went into service in 1980/81, at least in their first iteration, so retired having given in some cases more than a decade more service than the old electromechanical technology they replaced! Yet for some reason because they were digital, we seem to not appreciate just how old that TDM technology is. It won't be entirely cleared out of our network until 2023.

When our house was built in '65 Bell came out and ran MASSIVE amounts of bundled wire.  12-15 pair and it was a continuous loop throughout the house.  They put a loop adjacent to every power outlet as well as by each exterior door.  I'm sure it was with the intention of setting up an intercom. Great in theory but when they were hooking up the phone outlets they  found that someone someplace nailed through the bundle and many of the pairs were shorted out.  They did find a workable pair and years later found a second pair to light the dials in the trimline phones. We always had a slight hum on the line must have been a ground issue.