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?
In: Technology
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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