SHENZHEN S&Q TECHNOLOGY LIMITED

In 1970, it cost 70 cents to make a three-minute long-distance call in the United States—that’s the equivalent of $4.31 in today’s dollars. Today, however, long-distance calling barely exists. Not technically, and not culturally.

Area codes, now linked to cellphones, routinely represent geographic regions in which a person no longer lives. And telephone calls themselves are increasingly conducted via Internet connections—if at all—with voices transmitted over data networks, rather than along telephone lines.

These days, long-distance calling comes up as one of those little emblems of the way things were—surreal as looking back at a $730 CD player in 1982, or a $1,500 camcorder in 1990. Wait long enough, and the price you pay for various technological marvels will fall. So it follows that Internet connections and mobile-data plans will be far cheaper in the future, just the way long-distance prices evaporated. But is that right?