Sometime in the 1960s, GTE took over the long time mom & pop telephone company that served the Los Gatos area of what is now Silicon Valley, including the portions of the Santa Cruz mountains that were on the Los Gatos exchange. Service was horrible and subscribers were pleading over the ensuing decades for Pacific Telephone (Pacific Bell after the court ordered divestiture by AT&T in 1984) to assume the exchange, but it was not to be.
When Dave and I moved out to that area in 1989 and landed in GTE territory, we got to experience the sub-optimal service first hand. At least we weren't subjected to the weird Automatic Electric telephone sets that seemed like toy phones, since by that time we could use our own equipment. We had problems with both delayed dial tone and unbreakable dial tone, which is when you dial a number and still have a dial tone instead of a ringing signal.
I started working for Pacific Bell in 1991 and a co-worker of mine had worked for GTE in Los Gatos. She said the reason why Pac Bell wasn't interested in taking over the GTE exchange out there was because the mountainous region was a maintenance nightmare.
Once GTE morphed into Verizon, things got better and we even had services available that Pac Bell, the overwhelmingly dominant provider in the region, didn't even offer. We were upgraded to a 5E switch, which was superior to what Pacfic Bell was providing in the vast majority of its switching offices.
Toward the end of our 19 year stay in that area, Verizon's Time of Day recording went totally bonkers. The time lady would provide information such as, "At the tone, the time will be 4:20 and 98 seconds" or whatever. It wasn't long before the telcos were allowed to discontinue that service altogether so it was clear that Verizon had stopped maintaining it in anticipation of that decision.
Continental Telephone served the Gilroy area for many years. It was a much smaller operation than GTE, but I think at some point in the '90s Verizon took over.
The one independent provider in Northern California that gets high marks from its subscribers is Roseville Telephone in the northwest portion of greater Sacramento. Not that it makes much difference anymore since residential land lines are being abandoned by subscribers and the telcos are discouraging them. Other than the reliability factor, they just don't make sense anymore. I removed all long distance access from my land line after receiving an $11 charge just for having it as an option. All long distance happens from my cell phone now. At some point I'll end up on VOIP. Another high quality essential consumer service will be soon be gone forever, and there will be no chance of any telco building out new networks -- fiber or otherwise -- in the future.
I've been told that low income subscribers who are on "Lifeline" discounted service will soon be receiving cell phones and losing their land line service. What goes around comes around. In the beginning, telephone service was only marketed for business use, and that's rapidly becoming the case again well over 100 years later.
<script async src="//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
