Your telephone is more valuable

Your telephone is a much better “buy” than ever before. Many more people now have telephones, and local calling areas have been extended. You can call more people and more can reach you.

These days, when the cost of nearly everything is higher than ever before, the price of telephone service has remained relatively low. On the average, since the Korean war, the cost of telephone service has gone up much less than the cost of other things you buy.

Over the years there has been a remarkable reduction in long distance rates. Between 25 of the principal cities in the country, the average day rate for station calls has dropped from $6 in 1920 to about $1.55 today. The day rate for a New York-San Francisco station call has been reduced from $16.50 to $2.50. Overseas rates have been cut drastically since the service opened in 1927. A New York-London call that cost $75 in 1927 now costs only $12 in the daytime, or $9 nights and Sundays.

The goal—constantly improving service

The Bell System strives constantly to improve service. New devices, new systems, promise more and better telephone service at the lowest possible cost.

Dial service is being extended, of course, to more and more communities. Also, new equipment now enables operators to dial many long distance calls straight through to distant telephones without the assistance of other telephone operators along the route. Operator long distance dialing networks now crisscross the country, reaching out to about 3,600 cities and localities. Other localities are constantly being joined to these networks.

In more than 40 towns special installations enable customers to dial long distance calls directly to more than 11,000,000 telephones from coast to coast. An “electric brain” receives a number as it is dialed and completes the call. An automatic accounting system gathers the information for billing. Bell telephone engineers plan the extension of this Direct Distance Dialing to serve the whole nation in a decade or so.

Bell System mobile telephone service is now a reality in most major cities and on many highways. “Traveling telephones” are numerous on ships that ply coastal and inland waterways, and a growing number of passenger trains now offer regular telephone service. In addition, private line mobile telephone systems, leased and serviced by the various Bell telephone companies, are being used increasingly by police departments, utilities and industrial concerns.

With the help of fast, economical construction methods and new transmission techniques, the Bell companies are improving and extending telephone service in rural areas. Power-driven augers quickly drill pole holes. Special plows place wire underground and cover it, in one operation. By means of special equipment, both electric power and telephone conversations can travel to farms over the same wires.

These methods have helped telephone engineers and construction forces put in rural telephone facilities three times faster than ever before. Gradually, the telephone is eliminating the traditional isolation of farm life. Rural localities have been linked by literally tens of thousands of miles of new pole lines, by modern central office buildings, by the most up-to-date switchboards. Great strides are being made in improving the quality of rural telephone service.

With the steady pressure of world tensions, the Bell System has taken many steps to make sure that America’s defense needs will be met. The telephone companies have a good foundation to build on. Telephone buildings are of unusually strong construction. The entire United States is blanketed by a network of telephone circuits. American cities are underlaid by networks of underground cables, which, as wartime experience in Japan showed, would not generally be destroyed even by atom bombs.

The nation is now spanned—coast to coast, and north to south—by “backbone” communication routes. Calls between cities can be routed over many alternate paths, and destruction of telephone facilities at one point would be like throwing a pebble through a huge spider web. While service at the one point might be temporarily interrupted, the nation-wide communications web would continue to function. Because of the strength and flexibility of the telephone network, the basic means of communication in the nation’s Civil Defense setup has been built around the telephone.

Throughout America the work of improving and strengthening the telephone system goes on. The goal is to help make the nation invulnerable against attack, and to provide the public with the best possible service, at reasonable cost, in rural communities, in cities, and on intercity routes.