History of AT&T Long Lines
telephoneworld.org
telephoneworld.org
Microwave is line-of-sight so here on the Colorado front range and deeper into the mountains there's a bunch of sites high up on mountain tops that connect more remote towns. It's always fun to stumble across them when hiking, and I've made a point now of visiting some of the ones that are trail accessible to take photos. The juxtaposition of industrial equipment with the scenery is very striking and it's been fun to take film photos and submit them to the gallery on long-lines.com. Sometimes I worry someone might mistake some of my B&W photos as being much older than they actually are!
There's a bunch of amazing videos from the era on the AT&T archives channel on youtube, they're a lot of fun. It's easy to forget how groundbreaking this was at the time! https://www.youtube.com/@ATTTechChannel
In such places it was common to bounce microwave trunk lines with "passive repeaters": big aluminum reflectors, about the size of a highway billboard, setup wherever a line needed to get around an obstacle. There is an excellent article about it all here[1].
[1] https://computer.rip/2025-08-16-passive-microwave-repeaters....
https://long-lines.net/ and the coldwarcomms group are always interesting as well.
For anyone who wants a fun entry point into the rabbit hole, I'd recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Offices
This was a great article and put some context around it. It's interesting that many of these stations are basically apocalypse bunkers to keep equipment shielded for military use. There are many sites with the equipment still just sitting there untouched, slowly aging away.
My understanding was that MCI rolled in and set up dollar-store version of Long Lines, with sound quality to match. They used that as the basis to challenge AT&Ts monopoly to steamroll shitty service everywhere.
The cream-skimming that happened with profit-first MCI resulted in the loss of a resilience mindset and long-term planning for a national network.
Problem is: prices were REALLY high.
Competition worked out in Part 121 airlines and telco, in the long run.
The logo they used until just before the buyout was a stylized image of a pin falling down.
I know of a few in Idaho that were operational and maintained at least up until the 2010s ish.
The one I'm familiar with was for a ranger station and a scout camp tucked away in the mountains. It was only replaced because of infrastructure spending for rural telecom which happened around 08 crash. All the sudden for these rural telecoms it made sense to put in a line for miles up a mountain for 1 or 2 people.
I’m not so sure! These days we have FaceTime and dozens of other video and voice call services on our bodies 24/7 - and it’s so competitive among them that they are ALL free! We live in a golden age in a great many ways!
It’s awesome to learn about the engineering and history that got us to to this point.
There are certainly impressive things like starlink today. But the cheaper and easier to maintain infrastructure deployed to everyone was more common.
There's a lot of 60s infrastructure still in operation today. Some of it barely maintained (see the campfire fire).
1915: 1 kHz - telegraph lines
1925: 10 kHz - a handful of voice channels
1935: 100 kHz - several frequency multiplexed carrier lines across the desert
1945: 200 kHz - a few more lines - war time expansion restrictions
1955: 5 MHz - coaxial cable and microwave links
1965: 20 MHz - coast to coast simultaneous television and tens of thousands of voice channels
1975: 100 MHz - scaling up
1985: 10 GHz - analog to digital phase change - fibre optic and satellite
I still remember the first time I spoke to a person so far away the sun had set and risen in between.
there were so many TV ads and telemarketers pushing those plans that "the last long distance phone plan closed today" seems like it would've been a bigger story and the end-of-an-era.
Long distance plans were a regulatory invention that allowed customers to opt out of the local phone company's long distance service. Today those companies don't make monopoly profits (because everyone uses mobile phones and VoIP) so they price their bundled services reasonably. This pretty much kills the market for stand alone long distance plans, although they do seem to exist still. No market, no advertising.
But if a person can even get a traditional POTS landline (a pair of wires extending from the handset to the telco CO) at all in 2026, then: I'd imagine that choice still exists. There's probably still information about it on the back of the phone bill that shows up once every month.
But that whole business is practically dead, hence the lack of popular advertising.
It amazes me sometimes. One year, it was kit-and-parcel to move to a new place and order a real phone line (maybe with the same number -- or maybe not!), and it was important to make sensible choices for a long distance carrier. Then, MCI started offering flat-rate long distance for $50 per month. Soon after, it was common to switch to ISP-bundled VOIP to save some money, or perhaps a discount provider like MagicJack.
Then cell phone plans got cheap (Verizon was offering them for $7/mo at one point -- cheap enough for everyone in the family to have their own, and save money doing it!), and then got they got very expensive with the introduction of the pocket supercomputer, and now that pocket supercomputers are ubiquitous the plans can be cheap again.
Throughout all of these perfectly-rational and very sleepy transitions, the old telco cable plant still persists. It's in shambles, but it's present. One can see the infrastructure hanging up there on poles and connecting to houses, or down there with pedestals poking out of the ground roadside, but (at least in my city) ~nobody uses it for anything in the consumer space.
Good riddance. The amount of scams in the long distance industry was baffling. Legend has it one of the companies named themself "I Don't Care" so if someone said that when asked which long distance carrier you wanted, that's who you got with their ridiculously expensive rates. Calling cards were just an extension of the same idea.
Not much has changed there, apart from the sheer scale: the amount of scams in the internet industry is truly baffling!
Imagine back in time, around the year 2000, or so. Some german wants to phone with someone in Florida, US from Germany. The rates were not exactly insane, but very noticable.
Interestingly so called "call shops" boomed at the same time, which advertised calling cards. So I went into one and got some for really cheap. All of them worked, were about 10 to 40 times cheaper per time than my telco, AND had better voice quality. Just dialing a number in Frankfurt am Main, dialing in some code, and then the real number you wanted to talk to. Could be seen as a hassle, but worked for me.
I suppose tech companies like Google are the modern equivalent, but they don't seem to do quite as much cool stuff.
The one time in my life when the home phone didn't work in our house, I decided to wander out back to have a look. I saw a cable just dangling there in the alley that I visually traced back to the house.
I called the phone company from our other line (we had one for the modem) and reported this combination of no dialtone, and a down line. A truck appeared in less than 10 minutes. A short time after that, they knocked on the front door to say it was fixed, and speculated that maybe it'd been clipped by a truck or something.
If the old AT&T had purchased GitHub instead of Microsoft, it would be stodgy, featureless, grey, robustly-reliable, and delivered into homes and businesses over a dedicated copper circuit at profound monthly expense.
Current AT&T is the result of Bell ROCs buying out the national AT&T company.
But it's not the same company at all. The commitment to reliability is gone, the full vertical integration is gone, the monopoly revenues are gone. The market for phone calls is quite different as well.
It's a shame to have lost reliability and the increase in latency for audio is objectively bad and I don't know if we'll ever get back to near zero added latency on phone calls. Otoh, telecom competititon has driven much more capable and less expensive offerings, when they work.
Back in the late 90's and early 2000's, getting broadband was a problem where I lived. I oscillated among a few wireless internet providers (actual 802.11 Wifi to a repeater 11 miles away in one case,) and acoustic modems, as I changed properties.
For a couple years I used Qwest ISDN. That was by far the most reliable and consistent Internet I'd ever seen: it wasn't fast (128 Kbps,) but it never went down, and the latency and jitter was lower then anything I've had, then or since.
Nearly-instant dialup. And not just for a single ISP, but other ISPs as well: The circuit and the Internet service were provided by different entities.
Switch to a different ISP? No problem -- no appointments or installers making new holes in the house required. Just plug in a different phone number, username, password, and done.
And since each B channel was independent, one could do voice calls while the other did data -- dynamically, as-needed. Performance was resolute: Calls were perfect in their consistency, and data rates were precisely 64 kilobytes per second, per channel, symmetric, and not one bit more nor less -- and with constant latency (what jitter?).
And to not leave it to implication for those who don't know: An ISP wasn't required at all. Two people with ISDN could move data between their computers without involving the Internet. The circuits were switched in an any-to-any to fashion.
Want to play a two-player computer game a buddy, with voice chat, over ISDN in 1999? No problem: Use one B channel for data, the other for voice, and get gaming. The circuits are dedicated to these tasks for the duration of the game, and latency is a fixed constant (no Internet used at all, and no lag spikes either).
We've really lost something with the death of this point-to-point, circuit-switched technology. We're probably better off with the best-effort packet switched IP business we wound up using instead, but we've lost something nonetheless. It offered some neat opportunities and was a fun system to explore.
For me, it the continuum went like this: Dialup > ISDN > dialup > slow DOCSIS > faster VDSL > faster DOCSIS > [this is the part where I write a whole chapter about how there is fast, cheap gigabit fiber available in rural areas directly surrounding my small city, from multiple competing companies, but none within the city limits]
Anyway, IDSL. That technology skipped right by a lot of what was cool about ISDN. For me, real ISDN was always-on unless I disconnected it for some reason. While still "dialup" in the strictest sense, it was not infrequent to have sessions that went for months without any interruption at all. But I could also do anything else I wanted with it.
And backups: Apparently these days, a person can get a slice of Starlink pretty cheap. In this mode ("Standby Mode," IIRC), it provides a slow, always-on connection -- I think it's $5 per month for ~500Kbps.
The RV and snowbird communities hate it because it isn't free (they used to be able to pause service in off-season without monthly cost), but it sounds pretty good as a fixed, domestic backup: 500kbps is a lot more than 0. (And if this backup needs used for a long time or speed is important, then: 500kbps is way more than enough bandwidth to log in and pay for a month of real service.)
> this is the part where I write a whole chapter about how there is fast, cheap gigabit fiber available in rural areas
Not all of them. I'm in what amounts to the North Korea of 'murica: a place that is pitch black at night as seen by satellite photos. There is no fiber. Or, not infrequently, power. I'm on the edge of cable the service area, but it does work, so that's what I'm using.
Verizon built a tower 1/2 mile away, so now my 5G is all the bars, and I could get IP service that way if I wished. Then there is Starlink. Good times, I suppose.
Cell phone is unilaterally spotty (all carriers; I've got the gear to check that).
The cable network doesn't reach that far. DSL doesn't exist there. There's a local WISP that keeps talking about maybe making a move there, but it hasn't happened.
For the first few years we did a cobbled together cellular thing with a grey-market AT&T corpo iPad SIM, an LTE modem, and a directional antenna about 30 feet up. That worked, usually, unless the SIM died again or the singular tower being aimed at needed maintenance. (This was before cellular providers started willfully selling home internet.)
Now he's got starlink as his only WAN. That does pretty well for him, actually. We chat often, and at length, with his phone on WiFi calling and it works fine almost always. And by that, I mean: There's sometimes an audio glitch, and it's hard to pin down what the source is when it happens. It never lasts long.
The cool thing about cheap starlink as a backup is that, aside from the purchase price, it's like no-brainer cheap. I'd use it at home myself if my connection from Spectrum were iffy. (But Spectrum here is astoundingly consistent, so I don't see a need.)
The digitization of the system now put programs and computers in the mix, and I think readers here can appreciate the difficulty of having bug free code and 0 downtime in gear.
Just imagine the world without broadband. I don't love the phone systems of today in all respects, but there is no comparison.
Do you mean to say only monopolies can do 'real' things? I agree that some have, some did them and then became monopolies. And it sure seems like most things done in the world are by non-monopolies. Just look at the IT world.
Google does some, but the world's largest carrier is a Swedish company (their former ATT basically)
What a loaded question. Anyone and everyone lays cables.
You want to like, expand on that at all?
Its obviously hyperbole, but its hard to gauge to what extent you believe it.
Any questions or goal post shifts?
So nothing then in the grand scale of things.