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
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.
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