I was assured they DID have local access in our area. One evening i could not get into the Earthlink network. It was down for some unknown amount of hours and totally frustrated me. I decided to call their Technical Support dept. On a separate issue about Sprint.
Sprint is our local telephone company.
As I mentioned we already had AOL when we 1st moved into the area. Sprint was late getting our phone books to us and acted non responsive and didn't seem to care about their repeated broken promise on getting them to us. With no recourse, I called the local sprint operator to verify whether a supposed local AOL access number is was indeed local or long distance. I read several numbers off to the operator, she then identified what was suppose to be a local number. Yep, that's right.