>> 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. --
Or, hold on to that old Western Electric gear that is perfectly functional.
The only newer pieces of phone gear in my house are a 900MHz cordless phone, a 2500 set and a Trimline. Everything else is older than me.