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Rough cut: Five Phone Stories (Patreon)

Published:
2025-03-12 04:08:28
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Okay, this is one that I'm actually happy with and absolutely planning on finishing for normal release, but I wanted to put out the rough cut first because I'm hoping some of you can check my work.

Over the last week I came across a number of fascinating stories about the history of telephony in the US, centering on the internet boom of the 90s, and at some point I decided they were all sort of related, in a Pulp Fiction kind of way - none of them exactly connect, but they all cross paths. I think the result is paradoxically entertaining; I think I got the pacing and delivery right and that I explain just enough for it to be watchable by non-experts.

But if you are an expert on phone history, I'd appreciate if you could run through this and let me know if I got anything egregiously wrong. It's just missing the on-screen graphics, but it's watchable anyway since I describe all their contents - really, this is just a video of me talking. I just want to get a head start on any corrections since it's gonna take me a few days to add all the graphics and I'd like time to schedule pickups.

Though, if I'm honest, I feel like the bulk of what I cover in this is from a kind of dead zone anyway; everyone seems to talk about the time immediately before all these events, so I worry that I have a better handle on it than anyone who'll be watching, hah. Prove me wrong!

Oh, and let me know if the video seems... dim? I think it's dim. Ty!

Files

Five Phone Stories Roughcut

Comments

Twenty After Four

It does seem slightly dim, in the lighting sort of way.

Twenty After Four

From memory, in the late 90s ISDN was close to $200/month for what amounted essentially 2 lines which were slightly better than 56k dialup. So 128k data or 1 voice line and 1 data line at 64k each . I knew one person who had it in his apartment in Springfield MO circa 1999 ... he was a very dedicated PC gamer friend of mine. I'm kind of fuzzy on the price but I think it was between $175 and $225 at that time and it was hard to get it installed.

Mac Folklore Radio

$80CAD a month up here in Vancouver, BC for two B-channels by late 1997. :) Just for the lines, mind; you still had to have an ISP to dial.

Twenty After Four

Yeah I think the price I’m remembering included the full 128k isp data plan in the total.

Bryan Wann

inet-access was primarily a mailing list, they went back to probably 1994 if not earlier. I was on it back on my dial-up ISP days, it had people with ISPs with four phone lines all the way up to regionals and nationals. There was also a corresponding efnet channel for the social scene, both of which were invaluable for exchanging notes with other ISP owners when we were all figuring it out. Brooks Fiber was a CLEC that afaik brought in their own fiber plant in larger cities to put buildings on-net. A number of larger ISPs were able to buy PRI directly from them off of Brooks' switch as an alternative to RBOCs such as Southwestern Bell/SBC. After the 1996 deregulation when RBOCs were forced to wholesale lines (POTS and DSL) to CLECs, Brooks tried to come in and re-sell SBC business lines to businesses and ISPs at a discount anywhere in the state (I seem to recall offered around 15-19% discount). SBC threw a fit about this and went to state regulators, and the result was something like Brooks could only re-sell SBC products in the same market where they had switches and killed their business in non-large cities. (edit: this was covered in video) I believe Brooks was also betting big on the new settlement charges that had to be paid between RBOC/CLECs, where the call originator had to pay money to whoever terminated the call. Since ISPs were virtually 100% inbound-only, RBOCs had to pay Brooks so many cents/minute, Brooks paid nothing, and thus able to offer steep discounts to ISPs to get their business and delicious inbound-call minutes. Again, state regulators came in and killed this too. In the end Brooks didn't have a whole lot of competitive edge other than selling you metro fiber, and ultimately got bought up.

Bryan Wann

I can also offer my small opinion on why ISDN didn't take off in at least Oklahoma, a) nobody knew about it, b) PRI/BRI was only served off of switches in Oklahoma City and Tulsa and thus had only OKC/Tulsa phone numbers. This didn't matter if you lived in those cities or if you primarily used ISDN to connect to your ISP (you were all saved out of the same switch), but this mattered a lot if you intended to use your ISDN to replace your voice/fax business lines -- all of a sudden you became long distance to all of your customers. c) I seem to recall there was also a per-mile "line extension" fee so if you lived 100 miles away from the OKC/Tulsa switches and really wanted ISDN, you had to pay this milage on top of the monthly fee. I don't know about other states but something similar was probably going on in other Southwestern Bell regions too.

Bryan Wann

With regards to why somebody would want CT1 instead of ISDN PRI to provide 56k dial-up, I had this same problem. As mentioned earlier, PRI/BRI were only served out of metro switches with metro numbers. ("SmartTrunk" in SWB/SBC marketing terms). This made it useless for us to provide local dial-up access in POPs in telephone exchanges scattered around the state. In order to serve ISPs from local switches, SBC had to write entirely new tariffs to produce a new "SuperTrunk" service to sell channelized T1s off of local switches that had local phone numbers. This was around 1997-1998, after PRI had long existed.

Xaviette Katzenfrau

55 minutes in and the main impression I'm getting is you are making everyone understand the singularly American absurdity that was the "nationalizing the phone network without nationalizing it because god forbid the government provide a service to the public" and how it is very important in understanding why and how America's network infrastructure is the way it is today. It's making me think of my own area. For running a physical line to our house there's two options, AT&T and Spectrum. By the time I was old enough to pry into that sort of thing, I found my dad was paying something like $40/month to AT&T for roughly 7Mbit/s service. In like 2017. I am not joking. We streamed video from Netflix and YouTube on multiple devices like that for years like barbarians, struggling to push quality above 480p, if you made it through a whole video without it lagging out completely you considered yourself lucky. I am pretty damn sure it was ADSL. The only socket in our house was a little white plate embossed with "AT&T" with a green phone jack connection. It's still there, though we switched to Spectrum's 200Mbit/s service for the same price and they had to dig out our backyard and a neighbor's yard to run a cable directly through a hole drilled into the side of the damn house and through the ceiling lmao. Modem jacked directly in. They're always begging us to add phone and cable TV and cellular... But the promo price finally ran out and it went up to $70/month. Good timing though, as just last year there was a TON of construction in my neighborhood, from AT&T running fiber down every single street! It was insane, they dug up everyone's front yards to lay wire, they built new junction boxes, they worked the telephone lines, they even stuck up signs all around the neighborhood advertising the upghade "AT&T is getting Gigabit Fiber in your area soon!" type stuff to try and build hype. We've been getting the mailers begging us to switch back with their new promos. So I think it's time to hop over again and let the boys in blue come drill another hole through the side of our house. I should serve them apple pie for how American a tradition it is.

Jordan Chase

I love me some deep dives into obscure vintage tech. Glad you didn't cut this into a 12-minute youtube video like so many would have.

scheibenhonig

What a collection of rabbit holes! Enjoyed every minute of your stories and could follow along even without the visuals as someone with only basic understanding of phone stuff. The first Internet connection in remember using here in Germany was via ISDN - not sure how many lines were bundled back then (I guess it was two) until 2mbit/s DSL replaced it. Phone service (for our small business) we still got served with 4 ISDN lines up to the year 2018(!) when our local non-state operator finally discontinued it without offering a reasonable alternative themselves -> switched to VoIP over 50mbit VDSL only then. Telco history is mostly just bonkers if you think about it

Joe Thatcher

The summary of LLU was interesting - vaguely similar (and somewhat intersectional) to here in New Zealand. In the 80s, as with the UK and Australia, the phone network component of the post office was spun off and privatised, eventually bought by Bell Atlantic. Around the 90s to the early 2000s there were relatively few ISPs, including Vodafone which originally arrived here as BellSouth (and then acquired by the UK company of the same name). This meant while dial-up was very common across the country, Telecom effectively had a monopoly on ADSL. There were still companies that offered internet outside of dial-up over copper - I believe Woosh and ihug offered microwave (or satellite?) internet alongside dialup, and TelstraClear had a small cable TV network around Wellington. Your comment about LLU bringing in a "Cambrian explosion" is apt - when it was introduced here, a lot of the relatively large ISPs were soon bought up either by Telecom or Vodafone, and in turn a lot of smaller ISPs were able to offer much cheaper ADSL (especially given a lot of people who had wireless service were also able to now get ADSL for a whole lot less). The proverbial flames were stoked further when Telecom spun all of its copper infrastructure off to a new company Chorus (who basically own the lines and only talk to ISPs), so now it's effectively just another ISP. As a side note, they changed their name ages ago to Spark, but I have an old ISDN NT1 from them still with the old Telecom branding - I believe here when ISDN was in vogue, the Telecom-supplied NT1 was the demarcation point.

Zen The Fox

This was incredible 👏👏👏

sdomi

Important note about the inbound calls being "always free": while this is true for the overwhelming majority of cases, there *are* ways with international calls to split the bill or make the called party pay it in full. I've never tried it, but I've seen this as an option in at least one polish GSM network; Supposedly, such calls are always prepended with a notice that if you don't disconnect within a few seconds, you're gonna get hit with an extra fee per minute.

sdomi

aaaand finished the vid. i loved this, more telco stuff please <3

moe

King shit. Love a series of anecdotes based on recent reading

Torbjörn Lindgren

"dry pairs" - AFAIK increasing pricing was mostly temporary, I was told the most common "countermesure" by far was to add a balun to anything sold as dry pair. Baluns are something that is necessary for extremely long lines (think rural) but one side effect is to reduce or strip out high frequencies. BAM - put an aggresive balun on it in the CO and the cheap dry line no longer worked well (or at all!) for DSL service since that relies on those high frequencies - all without breaking any of the rules. I suspect they switched to these methods because various "legitime" users would otherwise likely have gotten legislators involved and they expected no one in Congress was going to stand up and defend "telcos" asking insane money for firealarm and elderly care alarm circuits - just to mention two common uses. AFAIK in some really competetive markets (big cities) ISP CLEC's even paid out part of the reciprocal compensation to the dialup ISPs, not just free lines. All second hand information but from the time since I'm in Norway. Yes, I had ISDN at one point, before ADSL became available in the area.

cathoderaydude

Wow, that makes a lot of sense. Like, my knee jerk reaction, don't take this the wrong way, is to interpret it as a bit of a conspiracy theory, except, we have ample evidence that the telcos regularly did this kind of underhanded shenanigan anytime they could, and it's another example of the regulations being used as a double edged sword. Since everybody involved understands that a dry pair, a phone line, a DSL line, and a T1 line are all the exact same piece of copper, just plus or minus certain SLA promises, condition promises, and repeater/filter promises, I'm sure it was understood that the dry pairs did not guarantee the presents or absence of something like what you describe, so it's entirely within the purview of the Telco to choose to add those, and they don't even need to justify it. You could go before the FCC and claim that it's anti-competitive, and the FCC would probably acknowledge that it was, but why are they going to side with someone who was obviously running a game in the first place? I can only imagine that the commission was perennially aware that everybody involved in each of these disputes was trying to rob the other one blind, and from the rulings I read, they definitely were. So I think, yeah, they would have reacted to this with "look guys, you know you were buying the low grade lines to get one over on the ILEC, if I were to grant you any relief here, it would just change who was getting one over on the other. Go home and put this one down as an L."

Freya Fractal

we take some considerable pride in understanding everything in that usenet post, first time round, despite being 25 years old. This may say something about our special interests and hyperfocuses more than anything, but eh, it works

Travis Noble

Gravis I think this may be one of my favorite videos from you. You mentioned how much work you put in to it (which is obvious), but I for one did not mind the fact the video did not feature a lot of the hardware you mentioned, so in the future if you want to make a video but are hesitant simply because you don't have this or that "prop", please make the video anyway. I'd love to hear you talk about the hardware evolutions in the PC platform (e.g. the transition from ISA to PCI).

Freya Fractal

also, additional: in the 1970s, at least on intraswitch and very short-distance local calls, yall all *did* have HD voice, essentially; there was, in the analogue era, no hard bandpass filters on the lines, indeed, a call between two Crossbar 5 offices in 1973 sounded one hell of a lot better than the same call between two ESS offices in 1995, simply because the 1973 call was like you described, a big cord between two phones. The only bandwidth limitations on that are based on attenuation of high frequencies over long distances, so in many cases, calling your nextdoor neighbour in Atlanta in 1978 served out of the Trinity step office would have sounded lovely and crispy, with frequencies well well above 4KHz.

Freya Fractal

additional additional: In your statement that you know people live outside CA, did you intentionally say "ok" like that in the most SoCal way *possible*? That was pure LA accent right there lol.

Ian

I grew up in the greater San Francisco Bay metropolitan area, and broadband wasn’t available at my parents’ house until the early 2010s. ADSL never became available due to them being behind a crappy remote terminal. Eventually the neighbors convinced the local government to write in the cable company’s franchise agreement renewal that they had to add service to a few vocal neighborhoods and a few years later cable internet eventually became available.

Alfred Klek

Great video! I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to the full release. One question has been bugging me though. I get my phone service through Frontier Communications and within the past few years they were HEAVILY pushing fiber optic upgrades in my region of Connecticut USA to the point that I would have actually been financially penalized for keeping my DSL and copper phone lines. Presumably this is because replacing the aging copper infrastructure is less expensive than repairing it. The question is: is there some kind of re-consolidation occurring where, rather than ISPs pretending they're phone companies to game the system, phone companies have become ISPs and are just pretending that they haven't in order to use the rules already in place to their advantage?

Wonkodon.com Fund

Holy Forking Shirt Balls! I lived through all that as the modem-monkey for Wolfe.net in Seattle back in 1996. Wolfe had over 400 POTS lines delivered by ELI to the 19th floor of the Westin, because that was the cheapest lines available at the time, they had a switch a few floors down. I had racks of Multitech modem cards feed by Ascend terminal adaptors. Do you know what it was like trying to find the one ring-no-answer modem in a 400 line hunt group? Let's just say I spent days with a buttset listening to pairs on 66 blocks. Anyway, there is one technology that you skipped in the ISP realm of the day: frame relay. That was the king back then. Frame relay was delivered on a DS1/T1 1.54Mb/s circuit but only the 64kb/s timeslots you paid for. Kind of a ISDN light. But ISPs in 1996ish were mainly selling frame-relay to business customers. I had ISDN in Edmonds to the Westin back in 1998. But I was working for a porn company back then. The first connections back in Yakima was for an ISP that quickly went under but left their modems and circuit up. Us geeks found out that we could still dial up to the node and then telent out to the Internet. Now this was all before SLIP and IP nonsense, so we just telneted into teleport.com in PDX. Later Wolfe out of Seattle came in with 10 modems and we would fight for the connections. We found that one could send a packet over 1024 bytes to another local user and bump them off, thanks to winsock's crap code. Anyway, I wanted to stop your video every minute to expound or tell you a story. I hope someday we can meet, it could be epic.

cathoderaydude

Thank you so much for all this info! I often wish I could have been there for all this excitement (even if it was a mixed bag, hah.) Fair cop on the frame relay thing - I admit that it's a concept that's been dancing around the periphery of my knowledge since I was a literal child, and I still don't really fully understand what it was all about, but I'm going to have to figure it out eventually. I mean, I was actually setting up FR interfaces on T1 terminating gear at my job, but we were only using it for point to point to the DSLAM, so I never got to see how any of the details of it worked!

Outlaw99775

I think they are closing the Westin Building or closed it? IIRC we had a project a few years ago to move our Eagle STP to another building.

cathoderaydude

I deeply regret never weaseling my way into the Westin back when I knew people who could have managed it.

Stormcrash

OMG learning that the NZ telecom market was briefly dominated by Bell Atlantic, Ameritech, and BellSouth just made my head spin. I mean, what even, how, why?

felix

This is awesome, thanks so much for sharing - this is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when you hinted at more "phone stuff" to come. Not much I can add given all my arcane telecom history knowledge is for the wrong side of the world (and mostly second-hand). With regard to the bit at the very start, about how no-one at Google has remembered to shut down Groups? ...sadly, someone did earn their bonus last year disconnecting it from Usenet. Not surprising given the spam problems, and how few newsgroups are used for anything other than piracy anymore, but still - end of an era. Also, I'm sure you're aware, but I bet many of those next hops on your hypothetical 1950 coast-to-coast call would be picked by a human operator, not a switch :) (I don't know the US implementation timeline well enough to know exactly how much of that route could be completed by operator dialling by then, but subscriber DDD was definitely not possible yet.)

cathoderaydude

Good catch, DDD didn't start rolling out for another year and took several more years to become ubiquitous. Silly mistake on my part, I should have remembered that. Thanks!

felix

Oh, and re: centrex. Off the top of my head (could have details wrong): centrex service in the US predates the computerisation of phone switching - "Centrex CO", as I think it was called, was provided out of 5XB switches, which were logically "partitioned" in much the same way as later electronic switches would be. But even before that, at least some Bells offered "centrex" service which was (as I understand it) a whole separate PBX - strowger, crossbar, whatever - either partly or wholly located in the CO, and managed by the phone company. (I think the ESS-based centrex services were where the concept really took off, though. I gather that that was what the designers of Centrex CO really had in mind, and while it was _possible_ for them to implement it in an electromechanical switch, it was really pushing technology a bit beyond its limits.)

cathoderaydude

Oh huh, I for some reason was convinced that it had been sold under a different name prior to computerization. I'm not sure how I missed this.

Bike Forever

Great content and I'll happily listen for 1.5hr being educated on the background detail I missed as it all happened around me (if here in the UK). Thanks

James Mitchell

The small per-minute fee was (at least to my teen brain of the time) a nontrivial part of why ISDN failed as well. You have to kick your own ass to get it, it's weird and uncommon, and then you pay $1.80/hr for data service that isn't THAT much better than you'd get for free with an analog line. But a stable, reliable, symmetric 64kbit would probably have been enough in '93-'96 to go somewhere, and hang around for quite a while after, if there weren't so many headwinds

Kerne

gah, I'm such a nerd....I could listen to you and Sarah from the Connections museum talk about telco stuff all day long >_<

E.J. Bevenour

One way to be eligible for ISDN back in the day was to order or add caller ID to your phone service

Wonkodon.com Fund

Yeah, after 9/11 the Westin became much less fun. I was installing a Cisco ASR 12000 router in there for Amazon when all that went down. Locked up that place tight. Before then, it was almost like a NANOG BoF in the hallways. You'd think nothing of popping down to Semaphore or AA.net and chewing the fat or borrowing a HSSI cable.

Ike Armela

Very interesting history lesson! I'm now wondering if something in the Act explains why Sonic requires every fiber subscriber to get voice phone service (which adds on a bunch of taxes and which most people don't want).

Dante Blando

First off, this was awesome! I started out on Usenet in August 1992 as a freshman in college. I still have a tee shirt mentioning a Usenet feed (alt.music.nin) and my former roommate was kinda famous on it. I took advantage of this reciprocation deal in the 1990s, yet I never knew about it. I had dial-up through a rural CLEC that had offices in our city. None of us got our phone service through them, which didn't matter. The BBS that they had swallowed to become an ISP not only offered unlimited dial-up internet for $18.95 per month. but "GET-1895" was their phone number. I paid for three months at a time because I didn't want an interruption. I never had a problem connecting. After half a year, they offered me a deal: pay for a year at a time and you'll only pay the equivalent of nine months every year. I kept paying for this for years after I left town, so that my parents had the internet and I had a shell account on their ol' Solaris box. I have more stories about this, so I should probably make my own video about it. A couple corrections: 1) Local unmetered calling started in the late 1960s. This quickly became common throughout the US and Canada. However this required local calls be on the newer, all-electronic equipment. Before the AT&T breakup in `84 and well until the Telecom Act of `96, the Bells had a cute way to amortize this. If you wanted to use DTMF (aka Touch-Tone instead of spinning the dial), you needed your line upgraded and paid an extra $0.25 per month. No big deal, right? Imagine it's 1984. You can buy your old telephone from Bell and stop renting it! (Ah yes, that other way to get more from the customer from equipment that never died.) You're elderly and don't really know this. Your kids buy you one of these new fangled phone with big buttons that are easy to read. Then you try to dial with the shiny buttons... but nothing happens. Oh, drop to your house is so old that it cannot handle simple DTMF. There may even be a load coil from before the vacuum tube era that adds more noise to ramp up the 12 volt signal. You could get around this on most phones by flipping a switch to use "pulse" dialing. The electronic phone would make pulse noises that replicated dialing. This means it took as long as dialing to connect, but you pressed buttons. 2) New York State's baby Bell was New York Telephone. With the `84 breakup, it merged with New England Telephone to become NYNEX. It wasn't until the late 1990s that Bell Atlantic swallowed them. Bell Atlantic had been the old Chesapeake & Potomac Bell ("the C & P") and whatever Pennsylvania had. There were two giant CLEC-esque exceptions in the NYNEX footprint: Rochester Telephone (known as "rt" in lowercase) in Monroe County NY, and SNET (Southern New England Telephone) in Connecticut. RT still exists, but it has long since changed its name to Frontier.