telephones caught in between
telephones caught in between
2026-08-02
During the heyday of AT&T, it was often said that the telephone system was the<br>largest machine ever built. The "hello machine" certainly was vast, but whether<br>or not you consider it to be a single machine raises challenging questions of<br>definition. The Internet, I think we can all agree, is not a single machine but<br>a system of interconnected ones. The telephone network, though, felt a lot more<br>like one device. "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" was once the slogan<br>of AT&T, a message that the telephone network is more than just a sum of parts.<br>The third of these principles, "Universal Service," is a key point around which<br>telecom policy pivots even today. As the telephone system was at its<br>apex, Universal Service became its undoing.
We know the Internet to be a network of independent devices in part because of<br>the wide variety of ways that we access it. Computer networks, almost to their<br>origin, have emphasized independent implementations of standardized interfaces.<br>Computers, as network nodes, are interchangeable. As a result, much of the<br>complexity must be pushed to the edge, where end-user systems are most able to<br>adapt to the unique needs of, well, the end-user. The telephone system was much<br>different: few types of telephone instrument existed, largely from a single<br>manufacturer. Complexity was drawn into the center where telephone offices<br>could house the huge machinery required by mid-century automation. All of it<br>was, for a very long time, hard-wired: central office switches and customer<br>telephones were designed and installed to suit each other. This core difference,<br>between the flexibility of computer networks and the central caretakership of<br>telephone networks, was a core issue in the series of changes that rocked the<br>telephone business in the early 1980s.
1984 is the K/T line of telecommunications, the year the sea peoples came. It is<br>difficult to overstate the extent to which telephone technology, the<br>communications industry, and the basic concept of what a telephone is changed<br>between the 1970s and the 1980s. This was not a single, well-planned, carefully<br>executed reform the way some accounts of divestiture can make it out to be. In<br>practice, it was chaotic, messy, and often drawn out.
The deregulation, re-regulation, and fundamental reshaping of the American<br>telecommunications industry is a complicated story. There are different actors,<br>different agencies, different motives, and different outcomes. Nothing went<br>quite as expected, and some of the consequences still remain to be seen. It is a<br>hard story to tell. We can begin to understand it, though, by focusing in on<br>just one part: the part in your house, the Customer Premises Equipment. Like the<br>"Standard Oil" gas stations that you can still find here and there, the breakup<br>of the Bell System left behind marks. More than anything else, it left behind<br>telephones.
From the genesis of the Bell System, telephones were considered just as much<br>part of the telephone system as the central office equipment that supported<br>them. Despite some early uncertainty, AT&T quickly settled on a pattern in which<br>most telephone users paid a single monthly rate that included local calling,<br>maintenance of the local loop to their premises (which we might call "access"),<br>and the telephone itself. When you signed up for service, Ma Bell sent someone<br>to install your phone. When you had trouble, they sent someone again to fix it.<br>When you canceled, or fell delinquent on the bill, they sent someone by to<br>take the phone away.
From our modern perspective of the telephone as "consumer electronics," it's<br>hard to picture paying rent on one. There were a number of reasons for leasing,<br>which varied in prominence over time. Some of the uglier parts of the early<br>1980s involved disputes over which of these motives really mattered. Phones, we<br>will see, were leased to consumers for many of the same reasons that early<br>computers were mostly leased to businesses. This reflects a parallel shift in<br>the computer industry, from "computer centers" to "personal computing," that<br>happened around the same time and in a similar context. Before we get there,<br>though, we need to understand how it came to be that telephones were "Bell<br>System Property—Not For Sale."
First, we need to understand the nature of telephones and telephone wiring<br>when the practice of telephone leasing was established. Consider, for example,<br>that the first phones in common use were not yet "common battery"—they had local<br>batteries, a wooden box full of big dry cells that required regular changes.<br>Telephones were much more maintenance-intensive, and those maintenance<br>requirements produced a troubling question of responsibility. Most people, if<br>they attempted a telephone call and couldn't understand the other party, would<br>blame the phone company. They'd blame the phone company even if it was the fault<br>of the caller or callee, for not changing...