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> Canada. It isn't possible to distinguish landlines from cell phones by looking at the number.

Atlantic Canada is small enough that there was a single area code for Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia up until a few years ago.

Cellphones in the region tend to have their own CO code (first three digits of the phone number), so you can usually infer if it’s a number you can text or not.

This is also the case for different regions of NS and PEI, so seeing a 902 number where the CO number is different from what you’re used to makes it seem “exotic”. This was also handy back in the day to know whether it was long distance or not.

This is slowly eroding as numbers get ported out, and landlines get disconnected.

> Usually not. You can ask your provider for a new number in a different city and they will issue it. Most Canadian providers are country-wide so you don't need to switch provide if you don't want to.

There's a way around this that I've done a few times. You port the number to VOIP (I use voip.ms) and then you set up that number to forward to whatever the new number you get given. Dialing out you still get your new number, but people dialing you can use the old number.

This was super handy when I had to move my mom from a retirement home in one city to another city a province away.

Practically forcing people to change mobile phone numbers when moving from one place to another is a level of evil I didn't not expect to exist in Canada.

Any idea if the premium was due to technical limitations or just to milk the customers?

You'd probably have to ask someone who worked in the phone industry at the time. I suspect that long-distance calls were legitimately quite expensive to provide at some point in the past, and the industry was happy to keep charging extra even as they reduced internal costs.

Luckily this is mostly behind us, almost all providers offer Canada-wide as a standard feature. Canada+US is becoming the common default.

Of course the problem with this system is that you need to worry about what plan the caller has. So if you want to be very sure that locals can call without paying long-distance rates it is still best to get a local number. But I think that in almost all cases the need for this has passed.

> I suspect that long-distance calls were legitimately quite expensive to provide at some point in the past

From the outset, what actually costs money is the (telephone) network. But people were often reluctant to pay the true cost of access to the network at first - so for a long period the providers charged for calls. After all if the average person receives 100+ minutes of incoming calls per month, but is only willing to pay you $15 for the network access which you want $25 for, you can take their $15 and then charge 10 cents per minute for calls to get the same net revenue...

In the US in particular the government regulators allowed operating companies to significantly overcharge for long distance in order to subsidise local calls. This creates market distortion which was judged worth it to facilitate widespread rollout of telephony. They probably should have reined it in much earlier, but hey, the basic idea worked.

Area Code 810 is the Thumb of Michigan, including some of central Michigan, so it's not all 8XX. Unsure how they draw the line, but 800 and 888 are the two that I see businesses use for toll free calling.

8XX where X = X