How does it explain long distance rates? I though that was to do with needing booster stations (if we're talking about landlines) and presumably multiple relays for cellphones?
In the early days a trunk might have been a literal bundle of twisted pairs, with each pair of wires carrying one phone call as baseband audio. For decades it would be tens of calls multiplexed into a broadband signal on a coaxial cable (or point to point radio link
[1]), with regular repeaters. Either way, more capacity means you need to add more cables, which is expensive. Now it's all fibre optics, with each fibre being able to carry literally thousands of calls, with fewer repeaters, and a lot less maintenance. It's not a bottleneck any more; there are only so many people wanting to make phone calls.
You need to have a complete network (with all the expense of digging trenches and such), but the cost of the capacity becomes marginal (indeed, fibre itself is so cheap that it's now standard practice to install additional 'dark' fibres which aren't intended to be used until some non-specific time in the future) so you don't need to manage people's telephonic habits by billing them at different rates.
For cellular, the scarce resource is radio spectrum. You've got a finite number of channels to play with, and once you start hitting that limit, the only way to win - short of new technology appearing - is to make the cells smaller (so you can re-use the same bit of spectrum in the next cell over), which means more infrastructure (masts, and cables or point-to-point radio links for the back-haul) to cover the same geographic area. Then at some point you have to connect your network to everyone else's, and suck up *their* charges for completing the call. Hence mobile calls used to be astronomically expensive.
Now we're living in The Future, and telecoms is all about shifting data around. Voice calls themselves are such a comparatively small amount of the data that they don't need much special treatment any more. Unavoidable
[2] bottlenecks are usually at the local level, where infrastructure is old or insufficient.
I can imagine a world where electricity generation is increasingly decentralised, and billing might undergo a similar shift as distribution costs begin to dominate. Maybe we'll be charged according to the current capacity of our supply, rather than the number of kilowatt-hours consumed. Maybe we'll pay Western Power Distribution by the amp, and then West Midlands Renewables Cooperative by the killowatt-hour?
[1] Hence the Post Office Tower and inferior concrete equivalents up the spine of England, which used to be sprawling with microwave dishes, and are now home to a couple of cellular sites and the occasional family of peregrine falcons.
[2] As opposed to ISPs being cheap about transit capacity.
