Just need to vent...

^ That.

 

^ But long distance phone calls were very expensive. Especially before 11 pm.

 

As a kid of the '60s I remember the quality of calls on Ma Bell was pathetic. You really had to throw out the decibels when you were talking from SoCal to Nova Scotia.
.

 

Yes. The rates were designed to be that way to limit the number of calls being placed. There were only so many inter city lines (known as trunk lines) available to service the whole country. When you called between two areas the trunk line that it used for that call would be used for the entire time that it took to pass the phone number to the other city and the time that the phone was ringing. If all 500 trunk lines connecting San Francisco to Chicago were in use (even if some were just ringing the distant phone), the 501st caller was not able to make a call to Chicago until someone hung up. The long distance rates were high to discourage people from tying up those lines for any time longer than absolutely necessary. It worked.

Sometime in the late 1980s the information needed to make long distance calls was changed to use a dedicated signalling network (CCSS7) that passed the caller / calling and status information from one city to the next. The big advance there was that the long distance trunk lines were not used until after the distant phone answered the call. This allowed the same number of trunk lines to handle a LOT more phone calls.

Those were good days. The employees were proud of their work. The equipment was built to last longer than the average career. By comparison, the modern systems have more features, but each of the "Big 3" telephone companies are working so hard to grab more money that they have forgotten that once upon a time, the Phone Systems were built to provide service to the customers, including emergency communications in time of disaster.

 

You forgot to include the "cash cow" element of the system.

 

As I recall the lectures on the subject it was the business rates, not the LD (long distance) rates that were designed to subsidize the expenses associated with maintaining telephone service in rural areas and the like. Evening LD calls were too sporadic in nature, and did not provide a consistent revenue stream. The average residential long distance call was optional in nature. Businesses, on the other hand needed to make calls as part of their business process.

 

Cory Doctorow has been writing about this general topic recently. He's applying it to some very modern things like social media in the linked article, but the core concept is the same going back decades.

 

Just to add my 2 cents on the Telephone system as I designed Computer controlled Telephone Switching Systems in the 70s and 80s for AT$T and ITT. Those systems were specified to run 24-7 and only have outages for 1 hour in 20 years of service due to ANY cause. This reliability (availability) spec was set by the performance of Bell System's No 1 ESS which actually achieved that performance in mid-life. Most systems that came later had that reliability as a goal, but didn't quite achieve it.

The system I architected in 1978-1979 (put into service in1985 and sold world-wide for 20 years - The ITT system 12, later sold as the Alcatel 1000 S12) for ITT actually outperformed the availability requirement as only one that I know of was ever down. That one was in a flood and was shut down for worker safety while being repaired. It was still providing service while the lower 1 meter was under water.

Today's mainframe computers and their networks sometimes achieve 98% system availability. A somewhat lower level of reliability than the telephone systems of the past.

JeffD

 

So were airplane flights, pop records, newspaper advertisements, any TV receiver......

Telecommunications changed fundamentally and forever in the 1980's after divestiture.
AT&T's flopped around on the sidewalk for a few decades after that because, like the behemoth it was, it took Big Bell THAT long to realize that it got hit by a bus.
Divestiture worked for a while, but after that AlGore invented the internet and android telephones forced Apple to slow their GM inspired 'planned obsolescence' pricing models.

NOW?
Paying actual money for a long distance phone call makes about as much sense as putting an ad in your local paper to sell your sister's Kia, or look for your lost cat.

 

We have DDM2ks chugging away happily in some of my offices that have had zero down time since they were installed - years before I hired on in the 90's.
Some of these are reliable AND efficient.

I've never swung wrenches on a 1ESS but the 5ESS is about as 'efficient' as the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service.
They were RELIABLE only when supported by, literally, dozens (or hundreds) of spare circuit packs, a Rube-Goldberg system of SS-7 signaling and a NTP, and 24x7 technician support nationally and live humans in each and every central office at least occasionally if not daily.

Otherwise?
Even when they were NEW those switches would not go 20 weeks without an outage, if not 20 days without 1+1 protection.

THE NETWORK was very reliable, but it was supported by THE MOST EXPENSIVE and LEAST EFFICIENT technology,

Unionized humans.

RELIABLE.
AFFORDABLE.
EFFICIENT.

Pick 2....

 

1 hour offline in 20 years... We had a chart on the district manager's wall that showed how close we came to that. We came close if you combined the uptime of all the electronic switches in the service area. We came pretty darn close to making it until we brought in NT (Northern Telcom) digital switches after divestiture to service the smaller cities. You can only hold such a strict standard if you count the time that it took to reboot the system as "uptime". The smaller DMS10 switches actually had to reload from tape after a hardware fault caused a reboot. The systems made by Western electric had two of everything and could smoothly switch from one processor to the other.

It's not that they had no outages. The outages that they did have were covered by switching between the active and standby hardware.

 

Dan, An "outage" was defined as losing service to more than 256 customers at an exchange. Switching to a hot spare if transparent to customers is not an outage, it is a maintenance event. Yes some Northern Telecom switches had issues. later Bell system switches "came close" to meeting the availability spec. (I worked on the #4 EES at Bell Labs as well as participating in the initial design of the #5 ESS)

JeffD

 

Nice to meet you Jeff. We might even have chatted at one time or another. I worked in a California 1A ESS HiLo office. For the others reading the thread, that's a class 5 switch (for local service) that also provides class 4 service (for long distance service). On the one hand it was a 1A local switch and on the other it had a huge number of inter and intra LATA trunks like a #4ESS. Since there were only a handful of similar switches in the Bell system we were often called upon to be the first in the nation to test patches. If it did not go well, we'd have ESAC, Bell labs and local techs all trying to isolate the problem at the same time.

During one of the union strikes I was called upon to monitor and maintain a DMS200 in a nearby metropolis. When the manager heard that I had #1A ESS and Nortel experience I was co-opted to assist in maintaining the #4ESS and DMS250 that were in the same building. They were close enough in design to the HiLo office and DMS100 machines that I could at least cover for the properly trained guy when he went to lunch.

That was a stressful week. On the plus side, I was able to work on their list of "permanently broken" equipment and get most of it back in service before the end of the work stoppage.

 

When I was grade school young, we got to visit the Western Electric manufacturing plant in Oklahoma City. I was too young to understand the technology but remember the smell of oil and Bakelite(?).

Bob Wilson

 

That was almost 40 years ago and I've forgotten most of what I worked on back then. I suspect that our district's definition for an outage included "customer impact". Our managers also fudged a bit with the "uptime" charts. It's almost impossible to get any motivation out of a chart that shows that a 3 hour outage from last year has tanked your stats for the next 60 years.

 

Bob, Were you ever that young?

JeffD

 

Personal friend of Alexander Graham Bell

.

 

"Mr. Wilson—come here—I want to see you."

 

We cut all of our state's COs to 5E switches in the late 90's (Except for the toll tandems) which was one of the reasons I got hired off the streets as an ET back in the day. I'm a 4-wall tech so I still get to play with glass which is fortunate because all of those 5E switches are about to join the glass jar batteries and crank telephones in history's dustbin.
I'm on a glide-slope to retire before they surplus me - but it's going to be close.
I'm covering 8 offices in three counties, and I expect that number to increase as techs retire or seek employment elsewhere.

 

They've made TV about that fragile now too. One single operations technician on duty to oversee 8 automated stations is pretty common; the next level will probably take it to a 1:32 ratio.

Good thing nobody needs this stuff to communicate during stormy weather!