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Phones
Why do Rappahannock residents, 6,622 of them according to the 1990 census, need seven telephone exchanges. Technically one could handle the entire county. Two would be more than sufficient.
Instead we have citizens with 987 and 675 exchanges, which are truly Rappahannock exchanges, except that a few people in Madison County also have 987 exchange numbers and can call our county seat in Washington but not their own in Madison.
In the northern end of the county we also have 636 and 635 exchanges, people who technically have Warren County telephone numbers and can call Front Royal, but not their county seat in Washington, which is served by the same telephone company.
Then we have 937 and 547 exchanges. These are considered Culpeper numbers. These people can call Culpeper and even Madison, but not Washington.
We even have a few people with 364 telephone numbers. This is a Fauquier County exchange. ; We believe people in Rappahannock County should be able to call each other without paying long-distance toll charges. At the very least everyone should be able to call 675 numbers in the county seat.
We urge our representatives to the General Assembly to consider this problem, which is probably common throughout the state, and enact a bill to require that long-distance charges be dropped between telephone numbers serving people in the same county.
We suspect that the telephone companies won’t like such an idea, fearing that they may lose some revenue, but that seems the least acceptable level of service to us.
If the telephone companies don’t want to allow people on all those different exchanges to be able to call 675 and 987 numbers, they could just give us all 987 and 675 numbers.
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