Party Line Telephone Service - Tell Me Why

[rp2813]

Yes, ringer wiring in the guts of the telephone was different for party lines as opposed to private lines.  Among collectors of vintage telephones, there have been many requests on collector sites for help to get a found vintage phone to ring due to the instrument having been configured for party line service.

 

When we moved into a new house (to us -- it was built in 1927) in 1960, we discovered that we were on a party line.  I was six and not using the phone much yet, but my dad had no patience for whatever woman was constantly using the line (I remember him yelling at her) and switched our service to a private line post haste.  I presume the switch involved a technician visit to reconfigure the ringer wiring in our telephone.  I was probably at school that day.

 

[jeb]

Party Line

We had a party line up through the 70's. It was all that was available to us at the time. If you wanted to call someone on the party line you dialed their number, hung up, then waited for your phone to ring. When we did get a private line (along with everyone else on the line) our friends up the road were on another exchange and it was long distance to call them. You could wave to them but to call them it cost long distance rates. Our little community was in the corner of three towns. We went to Butler school, had a Bellville address, and a Lucas phone. Needless to say all of our school friends were a long distance call!

 

[cadman]

I'm not sure when frequency ringers came into their own. I know it was an option on the early 500 sets, but to hear family talk about their party lines in the 50's/60's, it was still ring-pattern based.

When my grandparents built their retirement home in rural MN and moved in around '80, they were on a party line with a separate ringer wire. They had that phone plan for years but never did hear another party on the line. Kept their rotary until the 90's, too, as the Touch-Tone plan cost extra!

 

[fan-of-fans]

Party line

Don't remember ever being on a party line.

But, my parents bought a house built in the 1970s and there were phone jacks in the kitchen and living room. The bedrooms had two locations each with telephone wires but no jack plate installed. My dad decided to put in some phone jacks to the wires. When he did they plugged in a phone and got a message that they were on a party line. This was during the 1990s well after party lines.

They never could figure out what happened and ended up just not using phones in the bedrooms until getting digital phone and cable.

Anyone heard of wiring causing a party line message? My guess was he must have attached the wires incorrectly.

 

[rp2813]

Even though NYC was still enjoying its long gone status as the center of the universe back in the olden days (including that of AT&T), it's still amazing to me that party lines were gone by 1930.  I doubt this was so in the immediate suburban exchanges. 

 

Many parts of the country were lucky to have any telephone service available at all in 1930.  As has always been the case, Ma Bell was following the money and shunning areas that weren't going to provide an immediate return on investment.  Thank goodness for government regulations that changed all of that, albeit at a snail's pace.  

 

These days, the situation is repeating itself with telcos not being under any obligation to provide high speed internet service to rural areas if it's not worth their trouble.

 

 

 

 

 

[sarahperdue]

Party lines, etc.

My grandparents had a party line until the late 1970s in an Alabama town so small our entering and leaving signs are on opposite sides of the same post. Operator assisted long distance calls were the norm into the 80s. The advent of one plus dialing was a big deal. (and being rural, just about everybody was long distance--I get that whole "you can see your neighbor wave but it's a long distance call thing.")

I now own their home and have the same phone number. I'd say it's been the same since 1938, but I know it changed with the advent of 7 digit dialing. I had to call Triple A for service this afternoon... I'm not sure what map the dispatcher was looking at when she asked if I was between Rodeo Drive and the post office.
"M'am, we lost our post office and zip code in 1976..." (and we don't have any drives...they're all roads and only a few of them are paved.)

Both of our homes have POTS--plain old (hardwired, copper line) telephone service. Telcos are trying to phase out POTS and often use bundled services and deals to bait and switch users to digital or VoIP. A friend designs 911 systems, and he told me several years ago that current POTS line subscribers were protected by law--at least for now. Our landline in our primary home is also POTS, but AT&T switched us without fully disclosing what they were doing as part of an internet upgrade. We figured out what they'd done when the tornadoes hit us (Tuscaloosa Alabama) in 2011, and our phone wouldn't work. We had to fight to get the POTS line back. Maybe it's the country girl in me, but I still want to be hardwired, and I want my phone to work when the power is out... Interestingly, the power line is still strung on poles to the country house, but the telephone line has been buried for decades.

Sarah

 

[petek]

We had a two party line growing up until about 1965. The "party" was my aunt and uncle next door which worked out perfectly because mom could call my aunt by dialling 1191 instead of their full number Di4-0596 (still remember it). As well because my grandma and great aunt who both lived 100 miles away could call mom or my aunt and one of us kids would run next door to tell our moms to pick up the phone and they could have a 3 way call without paying for it.

Party lines still exist here with Bell but you cannot sign up for one any longer My friend still has his but his "party" he figures has long ago either died or got rid of hers. I don't think Bell can discontinue it as much as they'd like to .

 

[askolover]

I recall my mother talking about her mom having a party line into the 70's.  She lived in a little spot on the map town 10 miles from us.  We all had the same telephone company though...Loretto Telephone Company.  Lawrenceburg and Summertown had Bell Telephone.  Lawrenceburg was local but Summertown was long distance...and it was only a 30 mile drive within the same county.

 

[polkanut]

My parents were on a party line until the mid '80's.  At the time I had a clock radio with a phone that was set up for a private line only.  When the phone in my bedroom would ring my sisters and I would pick up and eavesdrop until Mom or Dad caught us.  I still remember the name of the lady on our line, Viola Hansen.  She was the neighborhood gossip so it was great to be able to get one over on her once in awhile. 

 

[jamiel]

Tennessee had a strange situation where the state required than anyone in the county be able to call the county seat for a local call. They also had a requirement quite late that each county had to have a pay phone (generally at the courthouse) available for the citizenry.

 

[iej]

The party line may have went away but the phone companies continued to use various multiplexing technologies to get extra customers onto the same cooper pair for many years.

They used what was often referred to as "pair gain" or in the UK "DACS". The earliest systems just put an extra line on the copper pair by shifting the frequency up out of range of your ears. So called carrier line systems.
The second line was just occupying frequencies you couldn't hear. Fairly simple equipment at either end could shift it down to normal audio channels again.

Later systems used digital time division multiplexing to carry multiple lines simultaneously.

Pair gain became less necessary as cheaper, smaller digital concentrators became widespread when TDM based digital switches like Bell Labs 5ESS and Nortel DMS in North America or Ericsson AXE, Alcatel E10 and S12, Siemens ESWD and so on in Europe.

By the mid 80s smaller remote switching units made rural communities much more cost effective but then very small cabinet based remote switches / concentrators meant you could put them far closer to end users.

That meant instead of hundreds of long and expensive copper pairs, you'd short ones terminating in a cabinet and a fibre running back to the main switch in a central office.

The advent of DSL (ADSL or VDSL) also killed pairgain and shared wires because you need dedicated copper to each end user.

At this stage the phone network's primary purpose is to carry data and the copper is vanishing and being replaced bit by bit with fibre to home.

Voice service is really just an app on an IP network

If you still have dial tone service from a central office PSTN switch maybe make a recording of it because in a decade or so that stuff will be as obsolete as VHS tapes and telex/teletype.

 

[cehalstead]

party line time line

Rock Hudson and Doris Day were party line neighbors in NYC (Pillow Talk)in 1959 and the Ricardos were on a party line in "I Love Lucy". I doubt that party lines were gone by 1930 in NYC. TV and Hollywood wouldn't have used them as story lines almost thirty years later........

 

[iej]

There were party lines that offered privacy though too. You'd things like a polarity switch that cut off the other party while the line was in use by reversing the polarity on the line.

I've heard stories from Ireland in the days of crossbar switching in the 50s, 60s and 70s. My aunt was telling me that there was an exchange in the small village she lived in and occasionally the switch would go wrong resulting in crossed lines with the system bleeding audio between circuits. Sometimes they could speak to each other, sometimes they were just able to hear an on going call. Being a very small town, it meant that you could usually identify the other people's voices.

It didn't happen very often but it did happen if a crossbar frame jammed in a a particular way. Being little remote units they wouldn't have had someone on site all the time.

This would have likely been a tiny Ericsson ARK crossbar remote switch with at most 150 lines.

Apparently that's why everyone was always a bit careful of what they said on the phone.

If you'd had a crossed line on a big switch in a city, it was far less likely you would know the person as it could have been switching 15,000+ lines. These little rural systems were barely bigger than an office PABX and small towns are full of gossips.

 

[fan-of-fans]

Lines crossed

About 10 years ago I got a call like that. I could hear two other conversations going on but they couldn't seem to hear me. I didn't recognize the voices.

Another time I got a call and when I picked up, I heard a ringing tone as if I was calling someone else and waiting on them to answer. When they picked up, it was someone speaking fast in what sounded like Chinese. When they stopped I just said "hello?" and they said something else and the call disconnected.

I believe both of those instances were when we were still on plain old telephone line service, before we switched to Comcast VoIP.

I don't remember if we had caller ID back then or not, it would have been interesting to see what it read in both cases.

 

[iej]

The only thing that could possibly cause that is you were going through a 'space and time' switching system. Some designs (not exclusively earlier) of digital switch had an analogue layer of crosspoint switching (usually using reed relays, not crossbars). They used that so avoid having to have dedicated digital line cards for every line. Other designs just went pure digital.

AFAIK the AT&T / Bell 5ESS took the space-time approach, certainly in older versions.
In Europe very old versions of Ericsson AXE did until the early 1980s, while systems like Alcatel E10 were pure TDM since the 1970s.

It's possible that the crosspoint layer of switching caused a crossed line.

Still a pretty cool 'accident' to hear. Probably one of the last little bits of analogue equipment in the network!

At this stage, even the POTS systems are not very likely to be using the same technology behind the scenes. The local switches may still be the same gear, but by now, a lot of the major switches even at local level are VoIP soft-switches just running on generic server hardware. They often refer to them as things like IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) but it's basically just VoIP done at a 'carrier-grade' level of quality and integrated into older systems. They're no different to what you'd see in any data centre. The local switches however might be retained a while to generate the dial tones and provide an edge layer for digitalising voice signals, just like they always did until copper service finally dies out completely.

As amazing as the new technology is, it's a bit sad to see the telephone network become nothing but an application on internet protocols. Sort of the end of a whole century of technology.

 

[yogitunes]

my aunt in Long Island, NY had a party line for years until she sold her house in 1987...she always called Mom after midnight, supposedly the rates were lower, and less chance anyone needing the phone....

also while visiting a friends winter home in Rutland, Vermont in 1990....mainly this was used in the winter season near Killington Mountain Ski Resort....was still surprised a party line was in use....

I guess many times it was a matter of cost, and of having a phone service, but not really needing it exclusively

I don't recall any special ring tone....never got to use one much, so don't know all the ins and out of having one...

someone could pick up and hear your conversation, or you theirs...but was also told, if you picked up while someone was using the line, you didn't hear anything, not even a dial tone, meaning someone was using the line.....

I also thought there was an indicator light on the phone, if flashing while ringing, it was for you, a steady light meant the phone was in use by someone else...

heck, I was glad we got touch-tone service in the late 70's.....the 7 digit number dialing was bad enough, then tack on the area code....at one point they added the Dial 1 first....and pray you didn't get a busy signal....lol...hang up, and start over!

just stuff kids today will never understand, where we were, and to what we have advanced into...

 

[iej]

In a lot of cases, they just added new registers to crossbars which allowed touch tone signalling. They weren't necessarily digital switches.

AFAIK touch tone / DTMF was possible since the 60s.

 

[gusherb]

My local CO has Siemens EWSD switches. Back when we still had POTS, call drops etc were very rare but once or twice a few random things happened. One time I was talking to someone who was on POTS out of the same CO and the call just went to dead air. I hung up and dialed the number again and it instantly reconnected the call because they never hung up. The DMS100 out of the CO at work never had any such blips in service however the 5ESS at my grandmas CO had a bad line card that I would receive in circulation every once in awhile that produced a horrible screeching dial tone.

 

[petek]

As far as I've ever experienced , the two party lines had normal rings and would only ring in the house being called.. The multi party lines was where each house had a distinct ring pattern.. My sister out in the sticks was on one with about 4 others and had their pattern..It became sort of second nature to only "hear" your own ring so she said.

 

[iej]

I know our landline was on an Ericsson AXE 10 or AXE 810 and I don't remember a single glitch ever. Those systems are absolutely bullet proof. I think that switch was in service in various generations since about 1980. It's still there albeit probably morphed somewhat into VoIP / Ericsson IMS.

AXE directly replaced and integrated with older crossbar stuff from Ericsson - ARF, ARM and ARK. I don't think they were ever used in the US, but there was a very large ARM used as Canada's international gateway for years.

The other PSTN switch that used here was Alcatel E10 which went through all sorts of generations. I know it was used here in Ireland because it was one of the earliest switches to have very flexible remotes which were ideal for the low density you get in rural Ireland.

There can be lots of reasons for a dropped call though, it might not even be the switch that was the problem. There are other pieces of equipment - it could have lost the link to a concentrator or something due to a faulty optical circuit.

A whole load of old widely used digital circuit switches have actually ended up as Nokia legacy products due to acquisitions:

Nokia DX200 (Their own switching system)
Siemens ESWD (Developed by Siemens, Bosch and DeTeWe and last owned by Siemens)
Alcatel E10 (CIT-Alcatel - the first generations of which were live in the French network in 1972 and the last generations of it are modern enough to natively support VoIP)
Lucent 5ESS (Originally Bell Labs / Western Electric)