Only the telcos could provide telephone equipment. If you didn t like the brands they rented, too bad. CNCP had recently won the right to offer private line voice service on a very limited basis. But they had few, if any, customers yet. There was no competition in switched long distance.
Cellular telephones didn t exist.
No carrier, in Canada or the US, offered digital circuits to customers. Voice messaging had just been invented, but it was rare. And, because it didn t connect to PBXs, it was very hard to use you had to dial a separate number to leave or retrieve a message. Token Ring LANs didn t exist. Ethernet existed, but only as a method for connecting dumb terminals to mainframe computers.