LIFE IN USSR 87. How hard was for Soviet people to get a telephone line? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: German_EE
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 28, 2019, 10:46:19 am
content: I remember when I was a little boy my parents had to go on the waiting list for a phone, but this was the UK GPO phone service in the 1960's. They also had shared phone lines, called 'party lines' where you had to press a button on the top of the phone to get a dial tone.Fast forward to the late 1990's and what eventually became British Telecom connected me to the exchange in my newly rented apartment. I got home from work and checked that I had a dial tone but I did not know my new number! So, I called the operator and asked her what number I was calling from and she calmly informed me that she was unable to provide this information due to data protection regulationsTwo examples of life from what was a monopoly supplier.

author: ealex
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2019, 04:09:20 pm
content: You would go on a long waiting list for a phone.For a significant fee (read as bribe) you could get a connection in a reasonable time, otherwise you could wait several years ( and I'm not joking).The lines where usually shared - 2 signal lines and a ground - you could hear the other user's conversation if you picked up at the wrong moment.Also, this made a lot of incorrect billing or spurious signals if there where problems with the wiring.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2019, 04:45:14 pm
content: i heard from eastern europeans that they would randomly try to scare you by having 'tone' signals which would say 'conversation has been controlled' (and hang you up, maybe disable the number for a while) if you were making a long call to 'shady' places etc. it was not staffed enough to actually spy on you, so it would just robotically menace you.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2019, 08:20:22 pm
content: Quote from: German_EE on June 28, 2019, 10:46:19 amWe had party lines in the US as well. There was no button on the phone but each person had a slightly different ringer tone so if you heard the phone ring you waited a few seconds to be sure that it was "your" ring. But there is nothing to stop you from listening in on the other calls that were to other people on your line. Since there was no button, before you made a call you had to pick up the receiver and listen to make sure that no one else was already using your line. If they were and it was an urgent call, you could ask them to hang up so that you could make a call. If you were on good terms with you they usually would. If you just picked up the phone and started dialing while someone was already using it they would get a whirring and clicking noise and were usually very PO'd about it! When I was young we had six different parties on our line. You could pay extra and get a two party line or you could pay a lot more and get a single party line but that was rare. Gradually the US TelCos put fewer and fewer people on each party line and think they did away with multi party lines when they switched over to completely solid state offices in the late 1970s and early to mid 1980s.Oh and it we needed to know our own phone number we could dial (something)11 and the operator or later the computer would tell us what number we had called from. That still worked the last time that I tried it, perhaps 15 or 20 years ago.

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 30, 2019, 11:49:07 pm
content: In 1970's and 1980's in Brasil the phone company was state-owned and we had a similar scenario: many years to get a very expensive line, you were charged if you had an extension and you had to declare it as an asset (like a car or a home) in the tax return form. Two party lines were somewhat common, but they had a light that indicated if the line was free or in use. If you picked up the phone, you could hear the conversation.At our home we had a single line party which worked very well until the mid 1980's, when the overall CO's were operating over capacity and it was not uncommon to have to wait for 30s to a minute to get a dial tone.The digital CO's really changed all this, together with the privatization of the entire system.

author: VK3DRB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 05, 2019, 10:22:42 am
content: Very interesting video.Here in Australia, a modern capitalist democracy, we have Telstra milking vulnerable Australians for everything they can get...https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-29/telstra-debts-in-the-hundreds-of-thousands-accrued-by-just-74/10289686That was September last year. Telsta was talking public relationssaying they would fix the problem because it is still happening some nine months later...https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7177117/Young-mum-faced-losing-2-200-bill-Telstra-slammed-unaffordable-contracts.htmlOK, nine months ago, maybe there was a systemic problem. But it is STILL happening. Again Telstra's public relationsmachine is in full swing.In my opinion, the CEO, Andy Penn, should have a large part of his last year's $4.5 million earnings from Telstra taken off him and given to these communities. THEN we will see some action.

author: MrMobodies
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 06, 2019, 03:08:13 am
content: 14:12 in the video.QuoteInteresting why they chose firefighters for the first.

author: TerraHertz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2019, 12:09:56 pm
content: The irony being, that at least in Soviet Russia you could eventually get a landline. Whereas in Australia in 2019, once the glorious NBN cuts in in your area, you won't be able to get (or keep) a simple, reliable phone landline for any amount of money, bribery or not.But it can get worse. My phone landline died about 1pm on Thursday 4th. So did the phones of over 1000 Telstra customers in Panania, East Hills and Voyager Pt, at the same time. Telstra's site outages.telstra.com.au reports an outage:"Cause: Cable damage caused by independent construction in the area" and estimates fix by Thursday 11 July (later changed to Frid 12th. A whole week.Telstra 'online help chat' guy says no system outage known to his system. Ran some tests, claimed it showed my line is working. But it's dead; also neighbors and shops in the area also lost landline service at the same time. So the tests are useless.So, 'independent construction' damaged a cable huh?Telstra lies. On Sat I went for a drive around. First stop, the local exchange building. No one there. Found a couple of NBN crews working on the streets, they knew nothing. Found a Telstra linesman, who said he'd just been over to Voyager Pt to answer a 'line out' call (part of the same outage) and had TDR'd the break location, gone to that area, seen nothing, and couldn't get any information via his official channels.Also chatted with him about Telstra and the NBN. He says Telstra is about half way through sacking ALL their linesmen, now down to about 6000, and all will be gone fairly soon since once the NBN takes over there will be zero Telstra physical system in the streets. Also very few of these linesmen want to work for NBN, since the general impression is it would be horrible.He also confirmed another detail about the NBN system - when the mains power goes out anywhere, so will the NBN in that area. If clients make special application, they can get a battery backup put on their NBN endpoint. A big Lithium battery, that provides about 12 hours operation. Ha. So, goodbye to a wired phone service that works through extended blackouts because it's all powered from the exchanges - which have massive battery backups and diesel generators.Then I found another Telstra tech, at his van. He was upset, because he was trying to deal with the outage and what caused it. He told me the details. That's where the "over 1000 customers" figure comes from, (and this includes all the Panania and East Hills shops, and all EFTPOS on their Telstra landlines.)Apparently, a major Telstra cable at least 12cm in dia, serving all that area, going up Tower St, had a section that was experiencing problems. So Telstra arranged for a contractor to cut out a long section, and remove it from the ducts. Which they did around 1pm Thurs. But there seems to be some admin SNAFU, and the minor detail of REPLACING that in-use cable and restoring service to the 1000+ customers, isn't happening for a week.Ah Telstra. I won't really miss you.Incidentally, if any similar stories turn up recently or in coming months, one could suspect Telstra of deliberately destroying segments of their infrastructure prematurely, as part of some 'force people to switch to NBN' process.

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2019, 02:03:06 pm
content: Quote from: TerraHertz on July 07, 2019, 12:09:56 pmThat reminded me of an incident when I was a brash, 17 yo freshman in uni. I was on the skeleton crew operating the radio station during summer break. Prime time for maintenance/groundskeeping to do major underground projects.Our transmitter/antenna were up the hill behind the campus and we had an underground conduit from the studio up to the transmitter shack. Of course, the maintenance people were digging a trench for something directly through the path of the conduit. We had not only the audio signal pair, but also the remote-control for the transmitter, and the remote telemetry for the transmitter (plate current and voltage, temperature, frequency and other important data). Back in those days the FCC mandated that radio/TV broadcasters had to log transmitter parameters every 30 minutes.When the conduit was broken, of course we were off the air. The prof who was the station manager freaked and sent student workers scurrying around to collect various pieces of gear to cobble together a temporary studio up at the transmitter shack. I just brought a handful of clip-leads to re-connect the circuits and within minutes, we were back on the air from the comfort of our sound-proof, air-conditioned studio while the guilty construction crew wiped the egg off their face and repaired our conduit.I moved to the uni campus the day after I graduated from high-school as a part of the 5-student summer crew. I was hired partly for my technical knowledge (from informal, hobby electronics and audio) and partly because I was the only member of the team who could properly pronounce all the difficult names of classical composers, conductors, performers, etc. (From spending my youth listening to one of the great classical music radio stations, KFAC in Los Angeles)

author: vk6zgo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 07, 2019, 02:23:09 pm
content: Back in the day when the old Postmaster General's Dept (PMG), & later Telecom Australia, ran the phones in Australia, there was a waiting time to get the phone on.It varied, but commonly was around 1-2 months.Once the phone was on, however, they were very reliable, & if you did get a fault, it would be passed to your local (manned) exchange, whererealTechs & "Lineys" who knew the area would fix the thing without farting around like Telstra does now."Party line" phones were not common in this country, but what was fairly common in remote areas of the country, was the "magneto phone", where you wound the handle on the front of the phone, the operator would answer, you told her what number you wanted, & she would connect you.On the front of the phone you were directed to "ring off" when you finished the call, but doing so would get you a "serve" from the operator---- dunno why they left the directions on the phones.The cities had dial phones for decades before such places did.Finally, in the 1970S & '80s, even the most remote towns went to dial phones.