It is not inaccurate. Demand ramped up *far*faster* than the Bell system
> projections indicated.
> There were numerous big-city locations where you _could_not_get_ RBOC
> phone lines in quantity, when you wanted them. 'Rationing' _was_ in
> effect. For a variety of reasons -- lack of field workers to do
> physical interconnects, lack of C.O. capacity, among the big ones.
> When you're down to the last few thousand numbers available out of a
> C.O. that serves 100,000 numbers, and the new switch isn't due for
> delivery for another 18 months, you _don't_ have many choices.
Number Ageing.
As recently as 10 years ago, the RBOCs had pretty much a consistent
12-month number aging policy. When the crunch came in selected offices, those offices were generally allowed to use faster aging, but the software generally could not accommodate different aging for speciic exchanges. Their choices were to lower aging company wide or have the service order processor override 12 month aging case by case. Neither a great solution, but aging changes did free up thousands of numbers.
Today I'd be surprised if anyone really cares about aging any more, especially with wireless.
Telephone _line_ sales had reached the 'saturation' point, Nearly
> everybody that was likely to buy telephone service *had* service. The
> only place for 'revenue growth' was in "add-on sales". 'Additional
> extensions' was the big-money item in this class. extra jacks were
> one-time revenue item. 'Long cords' (set to wall, or handset to base)
> couldn't justify much of a recurring charge. Additional sets, on the
> other hand, were almost pure gravy. With only one line there was, in
> general, only one phone in use at a time, so the wear-and-tear on the
> second phone was mostly covered by the increased life-expectancy of > the first one.
We're talking Western Electric phone sets, here. The kind that when they pulled samples and dropped them 50,000 times to see if it would break, it would't.
The building housing the phone would disintegrate before the phone would break No wear and tear concerns.
In my OCAP assignment, I rode along with a repairman one day, on an NDT complaint (No Dial Tone.) It turns out the husband got mad at the wife and threw the phone through the wall. Big hole in the wall, and the phone wires pulled out of of the box.
Repaired the box, reattached the wires, and the phone worked perfectly! Didn't fix the hole in the wall
One day Western woke up and found the retail cost of a new phone at Radio Shack was less than Western's cost of parts for a 500 deskset. So after some marketing shifts, they got out of the handset business. Today, break a phone? Buy a new one. Just like a TV. --
Art Kamlet ArtKamlet @ AOL.com Columbus OH K2PZH