This might be stupid but I never really grew up in a time when people used home phones. My family, at least. The other day I realized there was a phone jack behind an end table in my house that I hadn’t noticed before and started thinking about it and having a lot of questions. Are these phone jacks a public service or utility, like water and electricity? Where do the jacks even go to? do they have a phone number already assigned to them or something? Like if I wanted to, could I just plug any old phone into the jack and have it work?
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Born in 89 – here’s what I remember.
They are a utility, but it’s not an automatic service. You can’t just hook up a phone to a jack and dial out if you don’t have a phone service already provided for your home. Much like needing to get your water turned on or electricity account set up, you would call the service provider for your area (usually there’s just 1-3) and they essentially “activate” any existing jack/line for you. Not 100% on what that entails – but they do dig around in your wall – likely to hook up the phone cable from the street to the jack so it can be connected to the phone network. Once connected, you could dial out. And yea, as far as I know, all the jacks were “universal”, at least in the states. They looked like smaller, squarer Ethernet plugs.
The cable from your house ran up to a larger cable at the street, which was either buried (which is common nowadays) or hung from the utility poles. the telephone cables carry the signal from house to house. You could have 1 line (or telephone number) at your house or multiple (more than 2 was rare for my neck of the woods, and even 2 lines was just fancy!).
I don’t know the very technical pieces – for example, I’m not really sure if each provider has their own set of lines on the telephone poles, but they all connect into the same network (if you had BellSouth and I had A&T, we can still call each other). I do know electricity for the phone line was supplied by the phone company. If the power went out to the house , you could still make calls if the phone lines were ok.
The cables and poles themselves – as best I remember – were fixed by the private companies or providers that used them when bad things happened, but I don’t know if they rented them from the city or if they owned the cables as well. I’m guessing they owned it – as they often replaced cables after storms – but I could very well be mistaken.
You activate your phone line using your legal land description. You choose a phone number from a few options, then select your package. You receive a monthly bill. Very similar to a cell phone.
back in the day. there was a dedicated POTS (plain old telephone service) line that was run to every single house. much like power, water, sewer, cable, etc. and there was a telecom provider that controlled it and you called them to activate it. they assigned you a phone number depending on your area. nowadays that POTS line is useless and landlines are not actual landlines, they are VoIP lines. which means they use the internet service to make phone calls, which means they can use the same cables as your internet service and they hook up to your router.
In most countries they are exploited by private companies, and you do need a subscription. Furthermore, you often pay an amount per minute- more if you call outside of your area, and more than that if you call to another country.
The copper lines go to a phone central, where it will be redirected. There are probably some in-depth videos on how that works exactly.
> Are these phone jacks a public service or utility, like water and electricity?
Sort of, the telephone companies do tend to get regulated like other public utilities. But it should be noted that you **still have to pay for them.** Yeah, like all the other public utilities. Water and electricity are not free, those have bills too.
> Where do the jacks even go to?
They all end up feeding to telephone lines that go on… telephone poles. I’m *sure* you have heard of a telephone pole.
Oh boy, and ELI5 would probably take a lot of work.
Suffice it to say that yes, there was a local phone company you paid to get your phone number and that would maintain the physical line to your house. Like a cable company, they could also install jacks in your house, or you could do that yourself. (Phone cable is really easy to work with.) The local phone company was like a utility, but oftentimes it was a private company but regulated by the utilities board like most power companies in the U.S. today.
After the breakup of “Ma Bell” in 1982, there were also separate long distance phone companies — like AT&T, Sprint, and MCI. They handled traffic outside your local area (usually your town). They maintained switches and equipment between towns, but I believe they also used each others’ physical lines, like companies sometimes do with cell towers in certain areas today.
Your local phone company would have a batch of phone numbers to give out, based on their “exchange.” When dialing outside of that exchange, the long distance company would take over. Local calls were free (notwithstanding the regular monthly fee you’d pay for connection), but long distance calls incurred a per-minute charge. The charge could vary by the time of day you’re calling and where you were calling. So if you moved within town, the telephone company could reroute your phone number to another physical switch. But if you moved out of town, you had to get a new number because the local phone company couldn’t program its switches to accept your old one.
Basically, you’d dial a number, and the tones of the number would be interpreted by electrical switches that relayed your call, out of your local company, onto the long distance carrier, to the next local company, and into their phone.
(That’s once touch-tone dialing existed and was widely implemented in the U.S., basically by the 1980s. Before that, it was different, even requiring telephone operators to physically connect calls from local number to exchange, from exchange to exchange, and then from exchange to local number. And not every person had their own, separate wire. “Party lines” were one block, street, or rural area shared one backbone line were common. They were mostly phased out by the mid-20th century. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony)) )
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